I thought the group might be interested in the results of some throughput testing we conducted recently. The purpose of the tests was to determine the relative performance of the OpenBrick E platform as a Bering 1.2 VPN/router. The results were very interesting.
The test process was to FTP a 600Mb binary file between two identical PCs. The PCs were on 100Mb LANs connected via the Bering 1.2 VPNs . Before we did the VPN tests, we benchmarked the PCs on the same LAN so we could get an idea of the maximum throughput speed. The PCs transferred the file at 78.85 Mb/sec. The next test was to FTP from the PC connected to the OpenBrick E to the PC connected to a 500 Mhz P III running Bering 1.2. The transfer rate was only 12.67 Mb/sec. The 3DES IPSEC encryption was certainly taking it's toll. Next we replaced both Bering machines with Nortel Contivity 1500 VPN devices. The Contivity is a popular VPN concentrator for small branch offices. It was designed specifically for the purpose of a VPN concentrator. Imagine our surprise when the Contivity transfer rate was only 4.45 Mb/sec. The Bering boxes were running weblet, shorewall, dnscache, dhcpd, ssh, sshd, sftp, snmp, and snmpd in addition to IPSEC, and yet they were almost three times faster than commercial VPN concentrators. We recently pulled off the covers from a dead Contivity and found a complete PC with a 400 Mhz Celeron processor. Not wanting any usable hardware to go to waste, we put in a new (actually an old used) hard disk and made the Contivity into a Bering 1.2 VPN concentrator. We then used this Contivity in place of the OpenBrick E and ran the first VPN test again. This time the throughput was clocked at 13.11 Mb/sec! Wow! A Nortel Contivity converted to Bering 1.2 runs almost 3 times faster than one running Nortel software. It was also slightly faster than the Open Brick E with it's little 533 Mhz Via processor. I didn't try an unmodified Contivity to the Bering P III. It might be an interesting test to try. Maybe later. Here is a schematic of the tests/results: PC -------------------------------------------------------------------------PC 78.85 Mb/sec PC----------OpenBrick--------------------P III-----------------------PC 12.67 Mb/sec PC----------Contivity--------------------Contivity-------------------PC 4.45 Mb/sec PC----------Bering Contivity-------------P III-----------------------PC 13.11 Mb/sec If anyone else has done any benchmarking, I'd like to hear about it. My hat is off to the LEAF developers. You have put together one impressive collection of software. Roger ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click ------------------------------------------------------------------------ leaf-user mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user SR FAQ: http://leaf-project.org/pub/doc/docmanager/docid_1891.html