4 ms·
Software packet processing simply does not scale to the levels that hardware packet processing does, and that's not even mentioning the cost issues involved in
by kevingadd 6y ago
Software packet processing simply does not scale to the levels that hardware packet processing does, and that's not even mentioning the cost issues involved in provisioning and operating enough CPUs to do it. Maybe in a few years now that we're seeing higher core counts become common in non-server hardware...
- sleepydog 6y agoWithout knowing how hardware forwarding engines work at any kind of detail, I would be wary of throwing more cores at this kind of problem, because you would need to decide how to divide up your work between cores. You could use a 5 or 3-tuple flow hash, but then you're limiting the speed of a single connection to what a single core can do. And if you use any other way to divide up work, you're bound to get out-of-order packets which kills TCP performance.