[tulip] netgear 310tx

[C. R. Oldham]

Hank Barta wrote:

>     I am surprised to hear that because I asm using an old laptop
>     for my firewall (cable modem) and it seems to have no trouble
>     keeping up.

[...]

>         a 10/100 cable modem, so it runs at 100 Mb/s)

Yes, but the cablemodem isn't actually doing more than about .5 Mb/sec.
Doesn't matter if your net is 10 Mb or 100 Mb, it's the actual traffic that
will make the difference.

>     At the highest sustained throughput - about 450 KB/sec.  in
>     one direction, 'top' reports a CPU load of about 60%. And I
>     believe Donald has mentioned that the ne2000 takes a lot of
>     CPU cycles.

That's getting there.  Plus a laptop with 16 bit PC cards might not even
perform near a similarly configured desktop machine--laptop manufacturers
often skimp on things like bus performance to get costs down or save power.

>     With a 233 MHz processor, you should have in the vicinity of
>     about 10x the processor horsepower, (but perhaps not 10x the
>     I/O bandwidth?)

Nope.  Only if the machine in question is using PCI cards.

>     As an aside, I wonder how I would know if my firewall was
>     slowing down my cable modem throughput?

Watch top like you've been doing.  Also check your interface statistics for
dropped/corrupt packets.

>     would seem to know more about this than me recommend a P133
>     minimum for a firewall, but the 486/33 seems to be doing fine.

They might recommend that because a 486/33 will probably be an ISA machine,
and a Pentium 133 would be a PCI machine.

>     (But maybe I'd see 700 or 800 KB/sec with a faster machine. ;)

It's possible.  Is the firewall doing anything else?


--
  / C. R. (Charles) Oldham | NCA Commission on Schools    \
 / Director of Technology  | Arizona State University      \
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