Re: system requirements
On Sun, 17 Aug 2003, Jos wrote:
> Mensaje citado por "Jamin W. Collins" <jcollins@asgardsrealm.net>:
>> --- Pierre THIERRY <pierre.thierry@moine-fou.org> escribi?:
>> > > I would be looking close at 500+MHz for the CPU, to be honest.
>> >
>> > It seems very huge to me! I heard many running some 486 or pentium
>> > as thier firewall...
[...]
> I would have to agree with Pierre, remember the original question was
> about routing gigabit ethernet, not a common home firewall.
>
> In my experience gigabit ethernet is way more bandwidth than what can
> be filled with even a fast raid array (thinking about file sharing or
> video streaming applications, for example).
You need to upgrade your RAID array. ;)
Seriously, it's not that hard to get a system that can saturate one
direction on a gigabit network streaming from disk to the network.
You can build that for less than US$10,000 these days.
> But in a router application, bandwidth passed between interfaces may
> be much more than what passes between 2 separate boxes. So yes, you
> wouldn't make it with a pentium pro or crappier hardware.
>
> As mentioned in an earlier message, a fast PCI bus: 66 MHz, 64 bit
> would be recommended.
Actually, *two* independent 66/64 PCI buses would be desirable, along
with a very good memory subsystem...
> And these tend to be on the higher end machines these days (something
> more around 1-3 GHz), although one would expect the CPU to be idle
> most of the time...
...and yes, a CPU that fast should be wasted. Frankly, though, I stand
by my original statement that this is *not* what the x86 architecture is
good at -- throughput has always been the worst aspect of the hardware.
Daniel
--
In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left
to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
-- RFC 1925
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