On Mar 31, 2005 10:42 PM, Kevin Bowling <kevin dot bowling at wans dot net> wrote:
>   Interestingly enough, I am not experiencing the slowdowns users like
> Chris report.  I am able to pull my entire 4 megabit line down with
> minimal effort on the firewall.  Granted, 5.3 uses a bit more CPU but
> nothing too absurd.    My firewall is a
> 266MHz Pentium (not PII) with 64MB RAM.  
>  Perhaps it is an issue
> with a particular NIC chipset or code optimization (586 vs 486)?  I am
> using sis and fxp.
>

Everybody is taking my quotes out of context to mean a dozen different
things.  Everything from "5.3 can't do more than 3 Mb at all" to
people saying they don't have the problem when they have far more
hardware or far less bandwidth than I do.

A P266 is *way* faster than a 486 133 MHz (4501).  I can pull 6 Mb on
a 4801 (essentially a P266, though a Geode 266 MHz proc) and keep CPU
around roughly 30-40% max.

It's hard for most people to simulate the problem even if they do have
something as slow as a 486 133 since most don't have over 3 Mb of
bandwidth.  A 4501 on b3 can do ~7-9 Mb, and b5+ can only do ~3.5 Mb
(this all can vary by environment, but those are good numbers for
comparison).

If you stress test your hardware in a test environment (since you
don't have the internet bandwidth to max it out), you'll see the
severe performance drop from b3 to b5+.

I haven't tried anything that isn't NAT'ed, but the wireless to LAN
performance has been poor for several people (haven't really tested
mine) so that seems to be a problem as well.  This does give me some
thoughts on things to try though.

-Chris