Re: Flowtables -- any tuning hints?

The flowtable was initially developed so that ECMP could support
stateful load-balancing. In some ways it is a stop-gap for other
areas.

> Its only a misconception if you think its the only way to do things, which
> in itself is a misconception. I'm not at liberty to discuss specifics so i can't defend myself properly.
>
> I will say that designing a 10gb/s "system" that doesnt work well with a large number of flows kind of misses the target, don't you think?

If the only target that you care about is IP forwarding, I can respond
with an emphatic "yes". If you're running web servers, NFS servers,
stateful L3 load balancers, and many other applications, i.e. the
majority of FreeBSD users, I can likewise respond with an emphatic
"no". There are in fact quite a lot of users of 10Gbps that don't have
hundreds of thousands of simultaneous peers.


> The people who need 10gb/s are isps, universities and telcos; all of whom have a large number of flows. So I'm not sure exactly who is going to benefit from the work.

There seems to be something unusual about the "large number of
prefixes" crowd in that any facility that doesn't directly benefit
them is not worth having. You are not the first to step up and sneer
with contempt, and yet do nothing to address the architectural flaws
that hamper forwarding performance for your workload, and you will not
be the last.



Cheers,
Kip