[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

gauging network saturation



I have a few firewalls running on old machines under Debian, and as the
network traffic they are handling grows, I realize I have no metric that
allows me to decide when the traffic exceeds their hardware capabilities.
Just to be clear, these machines are not serving or caching anyting or
even NAT-ing --- they are just two PCI network cards and do iptables
filtering.

They never register any significant CPU or memory load, but I'm not sure
that they would, since the filtering is all in the kernel. I guess I could
ping to measure latency and do large file transfers to measure bandwidth,
but it would be nice to use some "built-in" metrics.

If I did need new hardware, what would I need?
  CPU? (to handle filter processing?)
  Memory? (to handle the TCP/IP stack?)
  NICs? (what distinguises a $20 from $60 10/100 full duplex card?)
  PCI bus? (does DDR apply to PCI or just memory?)
How can I tell which of these is the bottleneck?



-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org 
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org



Reply to: