On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 10:43 AM, Chris Buechler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Commodity PC hardware of any type may not be able to push that. It's > not about Gbps, it's about pps and the kind of traffic you're pushing. > You're going to max out at probably 1 Mpps (million packets per > second). 1 Mpps of 64 byte frames is 488 Mbps. 1 Mpps of 1500 byte > frames is 11+ Gbps. You'll fall somewhere in the middle likely.
Exactly what I was going to reply with. > Stick with the quad core procs and the Intel cards. Anything over 4 GB > RAM isn't necessary. Keep the procs. FreeBSD will spread the interrupt load across the cores. You won't achieve perfect scaling by any means since PF is still Giant locked, but there's some amount of cpu cycles that are still eaten up by the driver (and other parts of the stack) that multiple CPUs will help. As for ram, we're a 32bit install w/out PAE. You won't see more than 3G of that ram available to the OS. Nor is it needed. 3G of ram, should handle around 3 million state entries (you'll probably find some unique tuning issues well before that depending on the lifetimes of those states). > But there isn't enough info here to tell you whether or not any > solution based on PC hardware is workable in your environment. Agreed. Jumbo frames and handling backups, for example, I see no reason why you can't hit 6gbit on your stated hardware. Like Chris said, the number that matters in this game is packets per second, not throughput. --Bill --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Commercial support available - https://portal.pfsense.org
