[c-nsp] Cisco Routers: Performance benchmark

[Tony]

--- On Thu, 2/9/10, bored to death <bored_to_death85 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 
> for example, RFC 2544 says you should give benchmark
> results on traffic with 
> frame-sizes of 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 1518 byte. and in
> theory if we have 
> combination of packets with different frame-sizes,
> performance is almost equal 
> to the average frame-size of all packets, so if we have
> test results with these 
> frame-sizes, we can be sure if the router we wanna buy can
> work under the 
> highest load of the passing traffic on our network or not.

The Cisco document that has been referenced actually gives performance in PPS (packets per second). This is given away on the first line which says "Router Switching Performance in Packets Per Second (PPS)".
If you want to find out the performance for something other that 64-byte packets you only need to multiply the figures by the appropriate amount. Cisco even give you the highly technical formula they have used to convert PPS into Mbps, so you could substitute your required packet size into this formula.

As has been stated (and the document does too) the PPS figures are a best-case scenario when all the box is doing is routing packets. As soon as you do anything to make the router work harder then the PPS figures will drop. Cisco (and any other vendor) has no idea what your specific application will be and so they give the performance numbers as a guide to what you may expect and a way of comparing the different routers. 


regards,
Tony.