interface aliases - not so curious

[Vadim Goncharov]

22.02.08 @ 12:18 Niki Denev wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Vadim Goncharov  
> <vadim_nuclight at mail.ru> wrote:
>> Hi!
>>
>> After looking at humorous quoting about a man trying to ban unused  
>> addresses in
>> his network by putting 65535 ifcong_XXX_aliasYYY lines to rc.conf, I  
>> decided to
>> check this performance issue on a 6.2-RELEASE (GENERIC) and compare it  
>> with
>> Linux. Below are results from two machines.
>>
>> First, I've found that both FreeBSD and Linux clearly use linked-list  
>> insertion
>> to tail of queue, because time was growing as O(N^2). Then, Linux  
>> deleted it
>> slowly at first, then faster (is it using LIFO?..).
>>
>> But Linux with iproute2 was 6 times faster on addition (FreeBSD did it  
>> ONE HOUR!),
>> and even more faster on deletion. Why?..

[...skip...]

> The hardware seems very different between the two cases.
> Pentium D's are probably much slower than the new Xeons, and
> have less cache.
> Also, is your Pentium D machine really SMP or just HTT?

I've shown dmesg output in my letter, SMP GENERIC kernel told both CPUs  
are activated. HTT is present in features, I didn't any tuning with the  
machine, so probably it is real SMP, I don't know :)

Although this part is really curious rather than practical, we should  
think about another performance-related thing: as addresses are stored in  
linked list, what is overhead on multi-interface machine on EVERY inbound  
packet? Imagine an mpd PPPoE router with 2000 interfaces - every packet  
will cause lookup into this list in ip_input() - and ENTIRE list for every  
forwarded packet. If ipfw is enebled with ``me'' rules - EVERY such rule  
will cause such overhead, too.

Should we turn an alias address list into Radix or hash, as it was with  
VLAN interfaces?

-- 
WBR, Vadim Goncharov