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

[Kevin Bowling]

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. Probably equally important is the NICs, I’d go with Chelsio
T5 or Mellanox ConnectX 4 Lx or greater.

Hi!
We currently operate routers (FreeBSD 12.x, frr7) with
They get to around 5-6 gbit/s throughput.
What kind of hardware can you all suggest, if we stay
in the generic PC area, to improve the routing throughput ?
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[Rodney W. Grimes]

Hi!

Post by Kevin Bowling
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
82599ES 10-Gigabit SFI/SFP+ Network Connection
and
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>
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.