On Mon, 28 Jul 2008, Rev. Jeffrey Paul wrote:
As much as I hate to contribute to the problem, I'd like to point out
that the barrage of useless, off-topic, empty traffic on this list in
the last week is, in my estimation, quite a bit above the "usual" ruckus
of NANOG.
While I'm not one to thunk down the rulebook, can you all collectively
knock it off?
I gotta disagree with you, especially with regard to this thread. Much of
the conversations on this topic have ancillary benefits, specifically for
folks who need to populate networks with things like 10g forensic sensors
or similiar. I don't see commodity hardware router discussions being any
different from a foundry vs juniper vs crisco discussion, be it typical
fanboy nonsense or otherwise. As far as active threads on nanog go, the
signal to noise ratio on this one has already far exceeded more
'operational' ones. Even anecdotal experiences noted thus far have been
pretty insightful, and useful.
I even totally resisted the urge of bombing the thread by extolling the
virtues of the Killer NIC as a solution to all the throughput problems
people have, because I felt it would really derail what has thus far been
a fairly educational thread.
That said though, the more I thought about it (the killer nic joke), the
more I looked at it. What's the state of NPU offloading amongst software
routers? Is the notion even viable? I've seen a couple remarks about
various brands of network cards having various buffer and interrupt driven
issues as serious limiters to pps throughput, which is what prompted me to
think of it in the first place.
- billn