Click-Router Performance

[Sven Hirsch]

Hi,

We are doing some performance measuring with the Click-Router at the
moment and we're getting some strange results.

First our configuration:
We have three Athlon 700Mhz machines running Debian Linux with Kernel
2.2.18. Two of them are equiped with a 3com Torpedo 3c905c interface
card. The third has two of those. The Click-Router runs in kernel-mode
and is compiled with the --enable-greedy option.

We have a very simple setup to determine how many 64 Byte packets can be
handled by the Click-Router without loosing packets in the FIFO-queues
of the network interface cards. The two computers with the single
interface card create 64 Byte packets with the RatedSource element. This
packets contain the MAC address of the interface card of the 'middle'
computer, to where they are send. This machine counts the arriving
packets after the FromDevice element and 'forwards' them to the other
interface. The config files look basically like this:

	'left' and 'right' computer

	RatedSource( DATA \<64 Bytes starting with MAC address>, RATE X ) ->
ToDevice( eth0 );

	'middle' computer

	FromDevice( eth0 ) -> Counter() -> Queue( 200 ) -> ToDevice( eth1 );
	FromDevice( eth1 ) -> Counter() -> Queue( 200 ) -> ToDevice( eth0 );

We also use a seperate network analyzer to monitor the traffic on the
links (100Mb full-duplex).

If we send just from the 'left' or the 'right' computer, the 'middle'
one can handle up to 50000 packets per second, which is a lot less than
the 400000 packets, Eddie mentions in his thesis. Though this was
achived with the special device driver I guess we should get a much
better result here. Sending from both 'edge' machines simultaneously, we
can handle 28000 packets for each interface.

Does the tulip device driver make such a difference or what can we do to
get a propper performance with our router's??? Does the packet size play
a role in how many packets can be handled???

Any ideas??? Thanx in advance...
Sven and Niko