Hardware requirements for BIRD

[Clément Guivy]

Thanks everyone for your answers, that's very helpful to me :-)


On 07/03/2017 19:46, Matthew Walster wrote:
> On 7 March 2017 at 05:57, Clément Guivy <clement at guivy.fr
> <mailto:clement at guivy.fr>>wrote:
>
>     Hello, I am considering the setup of BIRD as a router to handle our
>     internet traffic. One information I fail to find is hardware
>     requirements.
>
>
> ​Clément,
>
> Let's just clear one thing up straight away -- BIRD is a daemon for
> routing protocols, not for routing traffic itself. BIRD itself will
> handle your requirements in terms of the BGP information incredibly
> well. As I understand it, BIRD only utilises one CPU core, but this is
> not the bottleneck factor here.
>
> When the FIB has been calculated, it is usually exported to your kernel
> (we'll assume Linux for now) via Netlink messages. Depending on how
> efficient your kernel is at building the trie structure, this may
> actually take more time than processing the BGP Updates!
>
> Once the routes are loaded into the kernel, it is the kernel (usually)
> that forwards the traffic. This is usually (roughly) proportional to the
> performance of your processor. You will probably have to make iptables
> changes to prevent that restricting the performance at high levels.
>
> That said, 1Gbps of IMIX traffic should easily be forwarded by any
> modern x86-like server out there. Just be aware that it will be more
> susceptible to small-packet attacks due to the lower packet-per-second
> throughput compared to routers you may be used to.
>
> Hope that helps!
>
> Matthew Walster
>