Any serious production servers yet?

[James Mansion]

>it performs under load. pf will barf on many real
>networks pushing a lot less than you think,
>depending on the complexity of the ruleset.

Well, personally if I had that much packet load,
I'd buy a dedicated system designed to do that.

>> cos you should first avoid entering the kernel
>> anyway as much as you can.
>Ah, from the mouths of babes (or people who live
>in tiny caves)!

Actually I work in a rather large bank and I write
trading systems.  These are line of business
applications that help us make money.

>If your network is pushing 300-500K pps its nice
>to have a firewall or security device or router
>that can handle it. And those filtering/network

So - are you wittering about packet shuffling
or not?

I guess I have a view of this stuff as base
infrastructure.  It has to work, but its not business
specific and it only affects the bottom line when its
broken.  Reliability is more important than
performance.  Performance and features are not
differentiators for our internal efficiency *or*
to our customer relationships.

One of *BSD's biggest PR problems over the years
has been a tendency for arrogant 'network
professionals' to suggest that the network is the
Most Important Thing.  But its only there to
support users in their day-to-day tasks, and
that means bespoke line of business software and
(to a lesser extent) personal productivity stuff.

What's more important - email?  web?  FTP? routing?
Or order management, inventory management, and last
but probably not least, payroll?


>That is the "Wall" for people who are on real
>networks. You could always count on the wall

In my experience, on 'real networks' we deploy
specialised kit.

Really, who the hell cares?  Most businesses
with a big enough LAN environment to need such
high performance (and modern systems are
pretty fast) will not look to deploy a
general purpose OS with no support organisation
on off the shelf hardware to do that sort of
task anyway.

But being a better system on 8- and 16-core
systems for dynamic web apps and database tasks,
that's a big deal, and a major issue is business
continuity - so using this sort of commodity
hardware effectively and supporting split
clusters and async replicatiobn *is* really
important.  So's net boot and cluster management
in HPC grids, though I suspect that my own industry
sector is more focussed on that than most outside
of R&D.

As for yoru assertions that the routing etc has
to be essentially single threaded - well, take
a look inside the OpenSolaris network stack.

Really - *why* do you care about this wall you
go on about?  Who is impacted by it, in
practice?

And how important is it compared to decent
application performance with Java, Mono and
Python?

James