[e2e] forwarding performance

[RJ Atkinson]

On Feb 13, 2004, at 17:22, Nicolas Christin wrote:
> 1 Gbps is a relatively small link speed for a router, by today's
> standards, right? Well, try to saturate a 1 Gbps Ethernet card on your
> laptop with traffic, without using jumbo frames, while running an
> overlay protocol. Good luck.
>
> As an example, a Xeon running FreeBSD can
> currently send in the order of 400 Kpps (see
> <http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/net/2003-12/ 
> 0089.html>)
> . With an average packet size of 1000 bytes, that's about 3 Gbps if I'm
> not mistaken, and that's when the PC is (as a first-order  
> approximation)
> only busy sending traffic. Imagine it has to do some processing with
> the packets received before re-sending them, as is the case in a
> peer-to-peer network or even when you're using your PC as a  
> PC-router...

Aside:

	It would be interesting to see some comparable measurements
	on a relatively modern PowerBook under MacOS X (current).
	(Yes, PowerBooks do come with GigE on the motherboard.)

	I don't know how the Mac would perform, but a PowerBook
	(or slower iBook) is increasingly common in the networking
	r&d community.  So it might make an interesting research
	platform for routing.

Cheers,

Ran