From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "John S. Denker" Subject: Re: Route cache performance under stress Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2003 07:58:33 -0400 Sender: linux-net-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <3EE5C7E9.6090401@monmouth.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Jamal Hadi , ralph+d@istop.com, CIT/Paul , 'Simon Kirby' , "'David S. Miller'" , "fw@deneb.enyo.de" , "netdev@oss.sgi.com" , "linux-net@vger.kernel.org" Return-path: To: Pekka Savola In-Reply-To: List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org On 06/10/2003 07:41 AM, Pekka Savola wrote: > >>Typical packet is around 500 bytes >>average. > > Not sure that's really the case. I have the impression the traffic is > basically something like: > - close to 1500 bytes (data transfers) > - between 40-100 bytes (TCP acks, simple UDP requests, etc.) > - something in between It helps to take a more sophisticated view of things. In typical networks: Most of the packet-count is to be found in small packets. Most of the byte-count is to be found in large packets. Some things (e.g. routing) depend mainly on the packet-count. Other things (e.g. encryption, layer-1 hardware requirements, memory bandwidth usage, ISP contracts) are sensitive to the byte-count. We shouldn't optimize one at the expense of the other.