Hi,

I did some throughput measurement on Soekris net4501 boxes running
m0n0wall 1.0 and got strange but reproduceable results which I can't
explain. If someone can I'll be all ears...

Available hardware included two net4501, three regular PCs (running
NetBSD and Linux) and some Soekris crypto accelerators (several vpn1211,
a vpn1401 and a vpn1411).

I used ttcp, nttcp and iperf to measure the data throughput. The results
shown here are the arithmetic average of at least three runs each.

Media type was 100baseTX full-duplex.

At first I measured the throughput when directly connecting the non-
net4501-PCs:

host1 -> host3:		86.3 Mbits/sec
host3 -> host1:		93.3 Mbits/sec

host1 -> host2:		83.9 Mbits/sec
host2 -> host1:		91.3 Mbits/sec

host2 -> host3:		86.2 Mbits/sec
host3 -> host2:		93.5 Mbits/sec

I can't explain why data throughput differs depending on the direction
of the dataflow. All systems were idle (apart from running iperf etc.).


I set up a test environment as follows:

	host1 <--> net4501 <--> host2 <--> net4501 <--> host3

With IPsec disabled, I got the following results:

host1 -> host2:		9.18 Mbits/sec
host2 -> host1:		9.21 Mbits/sec

host3 -> host2:		18.3 Mbits/sec
host2 -> host3:		10.2 Mbits/sec

host1 -> host3:		9.47 Mbits/sec
host3 -> host1:		17.1 Mbits/sec

Hmm, strange differences again...


I established a IPsec tunnel (ESP/3DES/MD5/noPFS) between the two
net4501 systems. The results were as follows:

# without accelerator cards
host1 -> host3:		1.26 Mbits/sec
host3 -> host1:		1.83 Mbits/sec

# vpn1211 each
host1 -> host3:		1.73 Mbits/sec
host3 -> host1:		3.52 Mbits/sec

# vpn1401 <--> vpn1211 (kernel failed to initialise vpn1411...)
host1 -> host3:		1.74 Mbits/sec
host3 -> host1:		3.39 Mbits/sec


That's much less than I had expected. What could be the problem?
Any hints?

Help is appreciated!

TIA, Jukka

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