Re: Performance of CentOS as a NAT gateway

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]



Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On 9/9/07, David Hrbác( <hrbac.conf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> how many connections are on the router (/proc/net/ip_conntrack) ?
> 
> This is way off-peak time for us (middle of Sunday night PDT) so I
> suspect looking at this right now is not very useful, but:
> 
> # cat /proc/net/ip_conntrack | wc -l
>   15140
> # cat /proc/net/ip_conntrack | fgrep -v UNREPLIED | wc -l
>     586
> 
>> what's the /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_conntrack_max
> 
> # cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_conntrack_max
> 65536

On top of that, i'd say that a PC, with whatever processor you could
put, is able to service a certain amount of interrupts / second.
Sometimes, you can have also cards / integrated peripherals that are
sharing IRQs and have trouble with it.  So in the case of a PC router,
i'd go into the BIOS setup and disable all the integrated peripheral you
don't use (LPT port, integrated sound card, etc).  Maybe you already did
this, i don't know.

There are some ways to improve performance like what Cisco does: having
line cards doing processing and getting pointers from the main
supervisor card and dealing with traffic locally afterward.  In our PC
case here, this could translate into using at least TCP offloading and
flow control (ethernet level).  Also, consider that not all ethernet
cards are equal and that using 802.1Q (trunking) also change the game.
Good cards have features to deal with all this.

Somebody mentioned pfSense.  I use it and there is an option that can
boost the performance: Using device polling instead of relying on
interrupts generated by cards.  I dunno if CentOS has this kind of
option, the ethernet gurus of this list could provide important
information on that.


Hope this helped.


Guy Boisvert, ing.
IngTegration inc.
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

[Index of Archives]     [CentOS]     [CentOS Announce]     [CentOS Development]     [CentOS ARM Devel]     [CentOS Docs]     [CentOS Virtualization]     [Carrier Grade Linux]     [Linux Media]     [Asterisk]     [DCCP]     [Netdev]     [Xorg]     [Linux USB]
  Powered by Linux