Which cpu/mainboard for fast routing (bgp, full tables) ?

[Rodney W. Grimes]

> Hi!
> 
> > That class of processor has fairly limited memory bandwidth.  An E5 v3 or
> > greater should get you what you want, although finding a system that makes
> > good use of available PCIe lanes with a single socket configuration can
> > sometimes be maddening.  AMD may have a variety of nice parts for this
> > application, although I don?t have any personal experience with routing on
> > such hardware.
> 
> Thanks -- I searched for a pair of boxes in my infra with those
> specs, found them:
> 
> Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-1620 v3 @ 3.50GHz
>   82599ES 10-Gigabit SFI/SFP+ Network Connection
> and
> Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-1620 v4 @ 3.50GHz
>   82599ES 10-Gigabit SFI/SFP+ Network Connection
> 
> and tested. Roughly the same performance, if we use only one
> connection.

These CPU's have a quad channel memory controller,
to achive anything close to the maximal memory bandwidth
of 68BG/s you need to have all 4 banks of the memory
occupied with identical DIMM's, and preferable DDR4 2133
or DDR4 2400.

Also iirc the 82599ES uses the iflib driver code, and I am not
sure how performant that is.  The Mellanox and Chelsio cards are
preferable in places that high speed is needed.

> 
>  iperf3 -c <destip>
> 
> The boxes were able to reach 10gbit, if we run 3 threads in parallel:
> 
>  iperf3 -c -P 3 <destip>
> 
> So I have some area where I can investigate further.

I am not sure if hyperthreading has any effect on this type setup,
I usually disable it on anything I want to be "performant" unless
I see some great need for more threads.

> pi at FreeBSD.org         +49 171 3101372                  Now what ?
-- 
Rod Grimes                                                 rgrimes at freebsd.org