9 September 2008 - 23:07Load under FiOS

Our home network is a bit complicated, since I’m a dork and I like networks. We have Verizon FiOS, Verizons Fiber To The Home network. We get 20Mbit down, 5Mbit up which is a lot by United States standards (if an embarrassment compared to some countries).

I’ve converted the supplied Verizon Actiontec NAT router into a bridge so that I can use anchovy, an old Dual Celeron 400MHz system. Anchovy is running Debian Etch. I have anchovy configured with DNS, NAT routing, QoS, firewalling, DHCP, and an IPv6 tunnel via SixXS.

Earlier today I grabbed some Ubuntu ISO images, and some other Linux rescue ISO images. This meant 7 TCP streams going at full tilt simultaneously, downloading to saturate the 20Mbit line rate. I checked the load on anchovy while this was happening:

Note the large amount of time spent in SoftIRQ, indicating heavy networking processing (in the kernel). The interrupt count remained relatively constant. Perhaps NAPI and/or interrupt mitigation was active?

Here is a picture of our “core switches” :)