ip masq performance
I just successfully got ip masquerading set up on my home network (two
computers, one debian, one win98... debian box does the masquerading, of
course).
As a first pass at configuring this thing (I don't plan on leaving it
like this, but I'm at the stage where I just want *something* that
works) I set it up using:
echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
ipchains -P forward MASQ
After setting up the gateway correctly on the win98 box, this gave some
sort of access through the linux box to the outside world. However, the
performance was abysmal - far worse than doing the same things directly
on the linux box. I did set "optimize as router not host" during my
kernel compile (does this apply to masquerading? how heavy a penalty
does this put on regular host usage... and for how much gain?). I also
enabled ICMP masquerading.
The linux box is a pentium 90 - slow but not *that* slow - with 72Mb
RAM. The connection between the two machines is BNC ethernet and doesn't
seem to be the bottleneck - transfers directly between the two machines
go very fast.
Is this horrible performance just something to be expected when using
masquerading? Are there any possible ways to speed it up? (could it be
caused by using gcc rather than gcc272 to compile the kernel? I thought
that would cause crashes, not slowdowns) Any tips on diagnosing the
problems?
Thanks in advance for any help,
Stuart.
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