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Date:      Thu, 29 Jun 1995 10:47:16 +0800 (WST)
From:      Peter Wemm <peter@haywire.DIALix.COM>
To:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD as a router
Message-ID:  <199506290247.KAA10690@haywire.DIALix.COM>

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In freebsd.hackers, nc@ai.net writes:

>On Fri, 23 Jun 1995, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:

>> > Eh??  Sorry to hear that.  A major part of my interest in FreeBSD over
>> > Linux (besides getting back to good old 4.2BSD/4.3Tahoe days :) is
>> > that I though it is a tiger in networking.
>> 

>I think a couple of people (or just me) misread what this guy was trying to 
>say. SO: Linux will not act as a faster router than BSD as far as I know. 
>BSD's limitations are not code based as much as hardware based [which was 
>mentioned before]. 

There are things that can be done to make it go faster still in
certain circumstances, but probably not much that will help in a
general way in everybody's situation.

For example, the routing tables, although they are quick, take a
reasonable amount of time to look up.  There is a single-entry cache
in the low-level code that avoids this lookup if the destination of
the current packet is the same as the last one.

I wouldn't mind having a go and seeing if expanding that could help at
all - even on simple hosts (vs "routers"), having several active
connections to several destinations at once will cause quite a few
routing tree lookups, even if they are all going to the default route
(reason: the destination is different).  I wonder if a simple dynamic
sized table of destination vs. cached route might help?  Of course,
it'd have to be flushed at each routing table change..  It's something
that'd be very hard to measure any benefit from..

>Among software based routing solutions BSD is among the fastest, period. 

Yep..  Just try an old SVR4.0 system - they max out at about 200KBytes/sec
over ethernet - and that's using nearly 100% kernel-mode cpu.

[..]

>-Jerry.

Cheers,
-Peter



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