On Wed, 9 Oct 2002, Christopher Smith wrote:

> We have two firewalls sitting on gigabit links.  Each has 2 Netgear GA620
> (ti driver) fibre cards with about 7 vlans spread across them.  Both these
> machines run at *very* high interrupt loads (95 - 100% during business hours
> (mostly 100%), 80 - 90 % during off hours).  They are 1GHz P3 machines (Dell
> 1550s) with 256MB of RAM.  They're actually dual machines, but enabling the
> second CPU doesn't help in terms of load, it just halves the numbers top
> reports.

> What hardware are other people using to firewall high-volume gigabit
> links ?

Sometime you need to get the right tool for the job. When the CPU is
processing every packet, the CPU will always be a bottleneck. To solve
this problem people starting putting the logic in hardware and creating
ASICs, which are only limited by the speed of the wire. I believe
Netscreen puts their firewall functionalty in ASICs and supports Gig
interfaces.

andy

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