Linux router performance versus dedicated consumer hardware?

I've got a couple of home consumer routers here (a Linksys and a
D-Link), the two of which perform very poorly when many different
connections are made (for example, when using a BitTorrent client).
The entire bandwidth of my (cable modem) Internet connection isn't
being used, so I know it's just the routing capacity of these home
products that's being overwhelmed.

Anyway, my question is this: If I were to build a cheap Linux/BSD/etc
box to route for my apartment, what kind of hardware specs should I
expect to need to maintain my Internet connection when many
connections are made? Or is this a cable modem problem?

On 31 Jul,
(E-Mail Removed) (Michael Herring) wrote:

> I've got a couple of home consumer routers here (a Linksys and a
> D-Link), the two of which perform very poorly when many different
> connections are made (for example, when using a BitTorrent client).
> The entire bandwidth of my (cable modem) Internet connection isn't
> being used, so I know it's just the routing capacity of these home
> products that's being overwhelmed.
>
> Anyway, my question is this: If I were to build a cheap Linux/BSD/etc
> box to route for my apartment, what kind of hardware specs should I
> expect to need to maintain my Internet connection when many
> connections are made? Or is this a cable modem problem?

My 100MHz 486 box worked well just for routing, It slowed down when used as a
server as well. I'm currently running a PIII 450 (512 meg memory) which is
fine. The 486 only had 64meg of memory, I think it would have been fine with
more.

--
BD
change lycos to yahoo to reply

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In comp.os.linux.networking Michael Herring <(E-Mail Removed)> suggested:
> I've got a couple of home consumer routers here (a Linksys and a
> D-Link), the two of which perform very poorly when many different
> connections are made (for example, when using a BitTorrent client).
> The entire bandwidth of my (cable modem) Internet connection isn't
> being used, so I know it's just the routing capacity of these home

How did you measure?

> products that's being overwhelmed.

> Anyway, my question is this: If I were to build a cheap Linux/BSD/etc
> box to route for my apartment, what kind of hardware specs should I
> expect to need to maintain my Internet connection when many
> connections are made? Or is this a cable modem problem?

I'd check out if this is really a problem of this device, or if
there are other problems like your bandwidth is already maxed out
('iptraf'), some duplex mismatch ('mii-tool') or other problems
cabling/connectors ('ifconfig' shows some stats).

Think about your electricity bill if you want to run the box
24/7, a hardware router uses far less electricity. An old P100
(32-64MB RAM) in runlevel 3 should be able to handle
routing/firewalling easily.

--
Michael Heiming (GPG-Key ID: 0xEDD27B94)
mail: echo (E-Mail Removed) | perl -pe 'y/a-z/n-za-m/'
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On Sat, 31 Jul 2004 09:07:09 -0700, Michael Herring wrote:

> I've got a couple of home consumer routers here (a Linksys and a D-Link),
> the two of which perform very poorly when many different connections are
> made (for example, when using a BitTorrent client). The entire bandwidth
> of my (cable modem) Internet connection isn't being used, so I know it's
> just the routing capacity of these home products that's being overwhelmed.
>
> Anyway, my question is this: If I were to build a cheap Linux/BSD/etc box
> to route for my apartment, what kind of hardware specs should I expect to
> need to maintain my Internet connection when many connections are made?
> Or is this a cable modem problem?

Until recently I was using a PII (300 I think) with 128MB as the firewall
protecting the web server for a large company. This was connecting the
server to the LAN as well as to the Internet and had quite complex
iptables rules.

We tried to stress this with the 100Mb connection between the server and
the LAN and it didn't break a sweat. No slowdown of the network connection
was observable.

This was a "temporary" (it actually lasted 7 months) replacement for an
industrial strength Nokia firewall, rather than a cheap SOHO type router.
It performed perfectly throughout. It was so successful that we are now
building backup firewalls out of PIIs so we can leave them sitting ready
to be swapped in should any of the Nokias fail. Since we adopted WinXP as
our standard desktop (I am not in the desktop department, not my
decision. My desktop runs SuSE and decided that a PIII was the minimum
required, we have plenty of old PIIs going spare.

At home I have a P150 16MB laptop running OpenBSD routing and firewalling
a 1Mb cable connection with about 15 machines behind it. This never gets
overloaded either.

So pretty much any old PC you can scrounge will be adequate. You are
unlikely to have to pay for it. A 486 would probably do, but there are
plenty of low end pentiums being thrown away.

But as Michael said, your routers should be able to cope fine so you may
have some other problem.

Regards, Ian

Michael Herring wrote:
>(for example, when using a BitTorrent client).
> The entire bandwidth of my (cable modem) Internet connection isn't
> being used,

BitTorrent can easily use the entire upstream capability of your cable
modem, and that will block or slow down downstream access for other
software (if your queries don't get through, you won't get any answers
either). Try limiting the maximum upload rate of BT to about 80% of
your upstream capabillity.

--
Markku Kolkka
(E-Mail Removed)

Ian Northeast wrote:

> This was a "temporary" (it actually lasted 7 months) replacement for an
> industrial strength Nokia firewall, rather than a cheap SOHO type router.
> It performed perfectly throughout. It was so successful that we are now
> building backup firewalls out of PIIs so we can leave them sitting ready
> to be swapped in should any of the Nokias fail. Since we adopted WinXP as
> our standard desktop (I am not in the desktop department, not my
> decision. My desktop runs SuSE and decided that a PIII was the minimum
> required, we have plenty of old PIIs going spare.

IMHO, using "old" hardware to replace monolithic dedicated hardware for
the most basic tasks like routing/bridging and minor to medium server
loads (web, mail, ftp, db), and even NAS, is exactly the way to go (and,
the one that I am going myself...).

The hardware that is being disposed off minor offices nowadays is by far
oversized for the office jobs that they were bought for in the past, and
they can serve far more than perfect for "every-day"-server tasks like
those described above. - And, this way, I really can afford redundancy.

Michael's point about power consumption was a really good one. - Of
course, PC-style hardware does suck more current than a dedicated low-
power device would. But, having in mind the security alerts that hit in
upon all of us recently (some of which regarding exactly this dedicated
hardware in question) makes me wonder whether it is not worth the
effort. - I am none of the Greenies, but I myself am concerned about
pollution as a result of waste of energy as it would be the consequence
of that replacement described above. Then, again, I wonder what exact
power requirements come with PC hardware. What I am experimenting on
is a power supply for such pre- and early-ATX P/S, and I'm replacing all
that with an off-the-shelf car battery with some real cheap charger.

Anyways, I also am running experiments with some micro processors that
would be flexible enough to run some severely stripped-down O/S based
upon Linux/Unix to fulfill such tasks.

From how far I got by now, unfortunally, I'd say that running "outdated"
PC-style hardware is significantly less expensive than developing and
deploying dedicated monolithic h/w, even if that is low-power.
[Expenses include developement of s/w and apps, of course, plus costs of
maintenance.]


> At home I have a P150 16MB laptop running OpenBSD routing and firewalling
> a 1Mb cable connection with about 15 machines behind it. This never gets
> overloaded either.
>
> So pretty much any old PC you can scrounge will be adequate. You are
> unlikely to have to pay for it. A 486 would probably do, but there are
> plenty of low end pentiums being thrown away.

Sadly so, see above. - Me, too, just recently replaced a (!) 486DX,
33MHz, 16(!)Mb _server_, only because there was no way to equip this old
pal with an 100Mb ethernet card for the LAN...

And, yes, the PI-133, 32Mb, shows 0.00 three times and hardly ever more
than 0.13...


> But as Michael said, your routers should be able to cope fine so you may
> have some other problem.

(Sigh).



Cheers, Jack.

--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
My personal reading of the string "MicroSoft" expands to "NanoWeak"...

On 2004-07-31, jack <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

> Sadly so, see above. - Me, too, just recently replaced a (!) 486DX,
> 33MHz, 16(!)Mb _server_, only because there was no way to equip this old
> pal with an 100Mb ethernet card for the LAN...

FWIW, I was able to find a 100Mbs ISA ethernet card for my old 5x86/133
server here. Throughput isn't as good as a PCI card, but this machine has
only ISA and VLB slots. The 100Mbs ISA card does do full duplex, though,
so it is still an improvement over the 10Mbs card it replaced.

--

-John ((E-Mail Removed))

The Linksys BEFSR router is a linux box (from my understanding of it). Performance of the device depends on many complex factors. For example the processor speed, amount of memory, and level of filtering and forwarding tasks going on I'm certain can have an effect.

I run a port out of my BEFSR41 into a 3Com switch and then go off of this for most of my network. A few other devices are attached to the router directly - the phone ATA adapter being one of them - to reduce the possitbility of downtime should the switch fail.

The switch does a nice job, ramming data to and fro within the lan.

If you need machines to talk to one another and are worried that the linksys might be slowing things down, try the switch approach.

I got my 3com switch surplus for cheap. It's made for a data center and gets hot. Like the old tube receivers and transmitters I used to play with before rice boxes came on the scene, hotter is always better.

-m-

On Mon, 02 Aug 2004 02:23:01 +0000, Mark Richards wrote:

> The Linksys BEFSR router is a linux box (from my understanding of it).

AFAIK only that series still use whatever proprietary os Linksys
started with. They do have multiple devices running linux, though. See
the following :
http://www.linksys.com/support/gpl.asp

> Performance of the device depends on many complex factors. For example
> the processor speed, amount of memory, and level of filtering and
> forwarding tasks going on I'm certain can have an effect.
>
> I run a port out of my BEFSR41 into a 3Com switch and then go off of
> this for most of my network. A few other devices are attached to the
> router directly - the phone ATA adapter being one of them - to reduce
> the possitbility of downtime should the switch fail.
>
> The switch does a nice job, ramming data to and fro within the lan.
>
> If you need machines to talk to one another and are worried that the
> linksys might be slowing things down, try the switch approach.

I have never had a problem with Linksys routers related to
bandwidth...They easily max out both dsl and cable connections, without
being the bottleneck. They do release regular updates, though, and there
have been alot of issues with specific apps running behind them...So if
you haven't updated the firmware, maybe start there.


--
- Matt -