CPU/hw recommendations for routing
Hi I'm looking into replacing some older OpenBSD boxes (running BGPD/OSPFD and do routing, no active pf) with some new hardware. Of course I'd like to replace them with something fast. Currently there is only moderate load ~200mbps / 200-300kpps. But a little room to grow wont hurt. I guess multicore is nice to distribute the load from the routing processes over multiple cores. The interrupt load from the nics is handled by one core only, right? Ideally I'd have a CPU with fewer cores but higher CPU frequency on each core? Does anybody have experience with Core i7 CPUs that supposedly can automatically over-clock single CPU cores? (such as the Intel Core i7-3770K). Are the AMD FX processors any good for this purpose? Is cache/memory bandwidth and speed a major concern? I did some basic tests with some hardware I have lying around and saw that a Intel Xeon X3470 performs pretty well. How important is the nic driver? In the archives I read that the em driver is pretty good. Is that still the case? Anything else I need to take into consideration? Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Regards Andre
Re: CPU/hw recommendations for routing
On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 07:49:27PM +0100, Andre Keller wrote: Hi I'm looking into replacing some older OpenBSD boxes (running BGPD/OSPFD and do routing, no active pf) with some new hardware. Of course I'd like to replace them with something fast. Currently there is only moderate load ~200mbps / 200-300kpps. But a little room to grow wont hurt. I guess multicore is nice to distribute the load from the routing processes over multiple cores. The interrupt load from the nics is handled by one core only, right? Ideally I'd have a CPU with fewer cores but higher CPU frequency on each core? Does anybody have experience with Core i7 CPUs that supposedly can automatically over-clock single CPU cores? (such as the Intel Core i7-3770K). Are the AMD FX processors any good for this purpose? Is cache/memory bandwidth and speed a major concern? I did some basic tests with some hardware I have lying around and saw that a Intel Xeon X3470 performs pretty well. How important is the nic driver? In the archives I read that the em driver is pretty good. Is that still the case? Anything else I need to take into consideration? Big caches, quick memory and a good IO conectivity helps a lot. AFAIK turbo mode of the new intel CPUs should work but I never tried to figure that out. The clock speed of a CPU can only be compared between the same CPU family. Sometimes a higher clock rate CPU is doing less forwarding than a slower CPU. -- :wq Claudio
Re: CPU/hw recommendations for routing
On 2013-03-27, Andre Keller a...@list.ak.cx wrote: Hi I'm looking into replacing some older OpenBSD boxes (running BGPD/OSPFD and do routing, no active pf) with some new hardware. Of course I'd like to replace them with something fast. Currently there is only moderate load ~200mbps / 200-300kpps. But a little room to grow wont hurt. I guess multicore is nice to distribute the load from the routing processes over multiple cores. The interrupt load from the nics is handled by one core only, right? Ideally I'd have a CPU with fewer cores but higher CPU frequency on each core? Does anybody have experience with Core i7 CPUs that supposedly can automatically over-clock single CPU cores? (such as the Intel Core i7-3770K). Are the AMD FX processors any good for this purpose? Is cache/memory bandwidth and speed a major concern? I did some basic tests with some hardware I have lying around and saw that a Intel Xeon X3470 performs pretty well. How important is the nic driver? In the archives I read that the em driver is pretty good. Is that still the case? Anything else I need to take into consideration? Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Regards Andre I'm using r210's with 6-port em(4) nics added, not too expensive and they work quite nicely (I'd rather have more boxes rather than redundant PSU). At around 200Mbps, most modern machines will give you plenty of headroom. Depending on where they are located you might want to look more at power consumption rather than CPU performance.
