[LARTC] Performance of Route Hat

[LARTC] Performance of Route Hat

[Peter Surda]

Hello guys,

normally, I try to avoid advertising my linux distribution in non-commercial
mailing lists (even though it's 100% open source), but yesterday's story amazed
me so much that I simply have to.

What happened yesterday? My largest customer switched from multiplexed DSL-Lines
(copper) to optics, and I did some quick measurements on the performance of
Route Hat. Admitedly, they are not very thorough, but I can do that as well when
I have more time.

Site specs:
- LAN consisting of 5 dormitories totalling ~1400 computers (max measured
concurrent users ~750, at the time the measurements were done there were
slightly over 500 concurrent users)
- 6 subnets
- 16MBit internet (16 up, 16 down)

Router HW specs:
- Athlon XP, 2GHz
- 512MB RAM
- 40GB HDD (only ~100MB used, mostly for logs)
- 2* 3Com PCI 3c905C Tornado
(you see, nothing special)

Router SW specs:
- Route Hat 0.3.193 (built 2. may 2005)
- all functions active except DHCP-Server (customer has its own), mainly: DNS,
NAT, firewall, bandwidth management, user management (IP+MAC matching), ip
accounting, transparent smtp proxy with a/v, checking for unpatched windowses
(vulncheck.pl, see here:
http://cert.uni-stuttgart.de/archive/bugtraq/2004/05/msg00228.html) and some
other experimental security programs
- user list polled from external data source (postgres) provided by customer

Active measurements (from a normal machine located in LAN):
- average RTT (ping) to next hop (provider's router): 20ms, packet loss 0.1%
- RTT jumps over 100ms in only 0.03% of the monitored packets.
- loading of webpage from heise.de (used because they have blazingly fast
webservers): 200ms
- download of kernel 2.6.12 from gd.tuwien.ac.at (44,5MB): average 208kB/s

Passive measurements (on the router, averages):
- Router system load - under 0.01
- Router CPU utilisation - under 0.1%
- Forwarding pps: ca 3500 in each direction
- Outgoing Bandwidth utilisation: 98%
- Incoming Bandwidth utilisation: 91% (I think I still have a reserve here)

Anyone is of course free to download it and try for themselves :-).

PS. Don't expect me to respond to anything until next Friday, I have exams.

Yours sincerely,
Peter
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