On 14-11-25 02:52 PM, Motty Cruz wrote:
Hello all,
I am searching for hardware to build a router with OpenBSD. I have
found mixed signals as to fastest system with i386 or 64bit. I know in
the past i386 OpenBSD used to perform a lot better than 64bit system.
Any suggestions!
Thanks,
Motty
As Nick said, it probably doesn't actually matter. Most of the junk
hardware you scrapped years ago can still saturate your WAN connection,
unless you work for a high-energy physics laboratory.
Generally speaking, if you have an extremely fast network, and you
really need to route things quickly, latency and PPS will be much more
important to you than raw bandwidth, and in that case you probably
shouldn't be using a regular computer as a router at all - go buy a
router from Cisco or Juniper or Huawei or Pick-Your-Favourite-Vendor,
and they'll typically give you better latency and PPS numbers.
If you're determined to go with a software router for one reason or
another (cost, typically): if you're going to use OpenBSD, I've found
that CPU clock speed matters most to latency, whereas the CPU's
instruction dispatch rate (or issue rate) matters most to bandwidth.
I'm not sure what affects Packets-per-second most.
The quality of your NIC and NIC drivers can easily be more important
than a 1GHz difference in clock speed. Don't forget the latency
inherent in RAM; slower systems can actually have lower memory latency
than faster.
In other words, as Nick said, it's simultaneously usually a pointless
question to ask, AND an extremely difficult - practically impossible -
one to answer.
FWIW, I'm running a pair of OpenBSD boxen as routers: each system is a
Dell PowerEdge C6100, with dual 2.27GHz L5520 CPUs and 48GB of RAM.
It's massive, massive overkill for routing, no matter how many full
tables I have in memory. (Top tells me I'm only using 338MB of memory,
which seems suspect.) They're fast enough for my needs; the fastest
usable connection they have is 1Gbps and they can easily saturate that.
--
-Adam Thompson
athom...@athompso.net
