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On Fri, 18 Jun 2010, David Johnson wrote:
Of course when you start reaching speeds >20Mbit/s router processing power can become an issue, so cheap routers will limit throughput even if they support the 802.11n standard (just ask anyone fortunate enough to have a properly fast Internet connection how important choice of router is!).
Well... This is where I have issues and questions: I'd like to know just what sort of hardware optimisations (ie. where did they cut the costs) go on in modern kit that struggles with a 24Mb connection...
Reason I'm curious/sceptical is because in 1995 I built a router round a P120 that had 3 x 100Mb Ethernet cards in it. (3 PCI cards) One Interface went to the LINX, one went to our network and one to a major content provider at the time. It ran FreeBSD and had (I think) 64MB of RAM.
That box was also running gated and handled full Internet routing tables - and really didn't have any issues routing the data. Sure - it wasn't doing NAT or any firewalling, but that was a P120 15 years ago...
So what went wrong? Why does modern hardware struggle with higher speeds? What have we forgotten or missed out?
My hosted servers sit behind 2 Linux routers - which I tested at their full data rate doing basic firewalling and filtering and they came no-where near full load - they are 1GHz VIA processors with 2 on-board Ethernet interfaces and a PCI dual-port Intel Ethernet card. All 100Mb. Under test, their combined throughput under normal conditions I had no issues running 400Mb/sec through it in both directions, but during a DOS attack one of my servers suffered last year, it did peak at 66Mb/sec - however that was a packet load of 100K packets per second - max load they normally see is 2-4K packets per second.
So it's not hard to build something that can handle load and do something usefull at the same time...
So where have the commercial router makers cut the corners? Are they really penny pinching to the last degree, or is it just sloppy system programming, or what?
Wish I knew - but then, sometimes I think that maybe I just don't care either - let the people who want cheapness buy cheapness and then whinge about it afterwards, while those of us who know, buy quality and sit back and relax...
(And also why did my N900 only get 6.5Mb/sec over Wi-Fi when it has a 600MHz processor!!! Which corners did they cut???)
Gordon (Almost saying "Get off my Lawn" ...) -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html