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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.eng.convex.com!hermes.oc.com!news.unt.edu!cs.utexas.edu!academ!bcm.tmc.edu!news.msfc.nasa.gov!newsfeed.internetmci.com!newsxfer2.itd.umich.edu!newsxfer.itd.umich.edu!news2.acs.oakland.edu!condor.ic.net!news.cic.net!pauls From: pauls@cic.net (Paul Southworth) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: FreeBSD router, as good as a harware router ? Date: 18 Jan 1996 16:25:29 GMT Organization: CICNet, Inc. Lines: 23 Message-ID: <4dls9p$p27@news.cic.net> References: <4cof7j$59@news.mistral.co.uk> <4cpu39$sft@uriah.heep.sax.de> <k8d98kgn9t.fsf@slbh03.bln.sel.alcatel.de> <4djtj1$d6u@uriah.heep.sax.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: locust.cic.net In article <4djtj1$d6u@uriah.heep.sax.de>, J Wunsch <joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de> wrote: :blume_h@slbh03.bln.sel.alcatel.de (H. Blume von Contributed) writes: : :> interestingly, ANS seems to use IBM RS6000 with some gated as routers :> for two to three 45Mbps plus FDDI interfaces. : :This ain't the question. The problem is, hardware routers start :analyzing an incoming packet for its destination address as soon as :the header arrived at the NIC, and so they have the chance to route it :before the entire packet went in. This is something you cannot :achieve with the traditional NIC architecture used in a Unix machine. :For an FDDI interface, this might get you 80 Mbps, as opposed to the :`lame' 45 Mbps of your Unix solution. My understanding of the RS/6k based routers used by ANS (more or less what was used for the NSFNET DS3 connections) is that you can't get more than about 30Mbps out of the DS3 HSSI interfaces, which have a nominal speed of 45Mbps. Whereas a Cisco 7xxx doing IP on a HSSI interface (not ATM!) will get something much closer to the max throughput of that pipe. --Paul