Hi,

quoted text
> Forget this. Cisco does CEF (cisco express forwarding) that's stream
> forwarding in hardware. You don't have a chance to reach this PPS with a
yeah, expect that it doesn't route everything and in the moment it falls
back to cpu your router is dead. then there I saw all kind of "funny" and
therefore extremely hard to trace and debug, bugs popping up with CEF
enabled if you use a bit more then just 08/15 routing.

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> pc / server based router (any os). And I don't think there is any
> equivalent hardware for Cisco and other router vendors. Because only
> routing decision is done in CPU / memory, packet forwarding is done on
> the "hardware layer"... so you can't compare Cisco CPU / memory against
> PC cpu / memory that's not fair :-)
>
life's not fair either ;)

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> But software routers e.g. OpenBSD are cheap and work well. If you don't
> need more than about 800Mbit/s throughput and you want to save some
> money us software routers... but agree, with a good server hardware,
> intel nics, dual core cpu, etc. you can get good performance out off a
> server based router / firewall.
well, up to around 500mbit any decent pc, doesn't even need to be server
grade hardware will smoke any cisco, which costs >10 times more.

if you need more performance, forget about cisco, get juniper if you
really need something _fast_ or foundry. cisco only now brought some
stuff to the market which comes close to what juniper delivered over
the last years. will cost some money though. fast, reliable, cheap.
pick two. ;)

i wonder though how fast a nice openbsd machine with some 10g cards in
PCIe slots will be. I guess we will soon find out, those things are
getting "affordable".

-sm