In article <1992Sep4.220256.2250@isa.de> I posted the following question:
As the traffic on our ethernet is getting more, I decided to split our
net. I have the following possibilities:
1. Use a bridge (costs app. DM 5000,--)
2. Add a second ethernet card to a SPARCstation IPC and use it as a
gateway (costs app. DM 800,--)
The traffic between the two nets will be NNTP (newsreaders), XNTP,
X-protocol and some NFS traffic (no diskless clients).
Using a SPARC as a gateway would be much cheaper, but:
- will the throughput suffer? Is a bridge much faster than a gateway?
How much?
- will the performance of the SPARCstation IPC suffer? It should be usable
by at least 2 or three users (app. 10 windows) and has to exports some
NFS directories, too. Currently this works well.
I received three answers from:
Gary L Dare <gld@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu>
pomeranz@nas.nasa.gov (Hal R. Pomeranz)
blplante@cvgis.prime.com (Brian L. Plante)
Thanks alot to all.
Using an IPC as a gateway is possible, but the following should be
considered:
o The SPARC should have enough memory because swapping will degrade
net performance significantly
o To ensure that the routed gets enough CPU, no real work should be
done on the machine. NFS service will be OK, but makes or so will make
routing slow (and renicing routed seems not to help).
o Hal R. Pomeranz wrote that I/O bandwidth for Sun ethernet ports is
pretty pitiful (benchmark shows only 2 Mbits/sec bandwidth, most
bridges have full LAN speed)
I'm not sure yet, but I think I'll wait until the budget allows us to
buy a bridge.
--
Andreas Luik E-Mail: luik@isa.de
(postmaster@isa.de) UUCP: ...!{uunet!unido,pyramid}!isaak!luik
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