* pf user <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2007-10-26 22:03]: > Henning Brauer wrote: >> * Russell Fulton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2007-10-25 07:36]: >>> Subject says it all: Can pf benefit from multiple cpus? >> no. > > But pf is said to benefit from a larger L2 cache*, my limited research of > reasonably priced CPUs for firewall machines finds that the latest crop of > Intel CPUs have huge honking L2 caches to presumably overcome some other > deficiency... For instance, the Q6600 has 2 x 4MB L2 caches, the new 5400 > series to be announced in November are supposed to have 12MB of L2 cache. > All of them are only available as dual or quad cores though. > > So is L2 cache still an important factor in pf performance with all the > changes that are coming in 4.2 - the rule optimizing and the memory > improvements and late checksumming and things of this nature?
well. this statement is not by me, but obviously, having as much as possible of the state table and mbuf + mbuf cluster space in cache of course helps. I bet it helps enourmusly. But how much cache you need ofr that, or where more doesn't make a difference any more, not only depends on your specific application (state table size, pps rates), I don't even have a half-clear idea about what amounts of cache we really talk :) -- Henning Brauer, [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] BS Web Services, http://bsws.de Full-Service ISP - Secure Hosting, Mail and DNS Services Dedicated Servers, Rootservers, Application Hosting - Hamburg & Amsterdam
