it boils down to intel, intel or intel at the moment. it is particularily the drivers' faults that all others are worse at the moment, but that's how it is.
you don't need polling wit reasonable NICs. where reasonable
(unfortunately) translates to em(4), em(4) or em(4). yeah, more choice would be nice.
A couple of weeks ago, I set up a transparent bridge-firewall running 3.4 and pf on a 300 mhz AMD with 64m's of RAM. I put it in front of a 100mb/s LAN.
The only cards I had lying around were 3COM 905b's (xl). The performance of the bridge was bad enough that I wrote into this list. So I ordered a pair of Intel 1000MT's (even though the switches are all 10/100, not 1000). The difference is really phenomenal.
In tweaking the firewall with the xl's, I ran lots of tests and with the bridge I was able to get 40% of the bandwidth that I had without it. With the em's (Intel 1000MT's) there was really no demonstrable loss of speed.
Thanks for making pf work so well,
Mike
-- ---------------------------------------- Michael H. Semcheski ----------------------------------------
