At 08:31 PM 12/17/01 -0500, Michael Leone wrote: >On Mon, 2001-12-17 at 20:09, Paul Rimmer wrote: >> This really suprises me. I was under the impression that a 486/66 would be >> able to service a maxed out cable modem? I happen to be using a 486/66 on a >> cable connection but will upgrade if it will help throughput. >> >> Any comments on 486 vs Pentium servicing a cable or ADSL modem? > >Sure. It's not the processor; it's the bus speed that is a limiting >factor. I use a P90 (with PCI bus) on a 640Kb ADSL line; I routinely >average 62KB (that equates to 620Kb) downloads.
Well ... sort of. Kenneth's original comment was about speeds over 1 Mbps, not 640 Kbps. In practice, a 486 with a 10 Mbps NIC will run, flat out at around 5 Mbps ... I've tested this many times with direct E-to-E routing between LANs, and docs on a former Don Becker site reported the same thing as the bus limitation. That's plenty to keep up with 1 Mbps. But Kenneth's experience is probably with routers running on PPPoE connections. This extra layer of encapsulation (of a PPP frame inside an Ethernet frame) requires extra CPU cycles, and that starts to become a problem on 486s when the base speed gets high. I don't myself know what a PPPoE link maxes out at with a 486 router, but I'd trust Kenneth's experience here. Cable never (that I know of) uses PPPoE, and not all DSL lines do (mine doesn't, for example). For them, a 486 should be able to handle T1 speeds (1.5 Mbps) easily. -- ------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"--- Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Leaf-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user
