Worth Reading: 2 Mpps on a Pentium CPU
Robert Graham published a blog post describing how his IDS/IPS system handled 2 Mpps on a Pentium III CPU 20 years ago… and yet some people keep claiming that “Driving a 100 Gbps network at 80% utilization in both directions consumes 10–20 cores just in the networking stack” (in 2023). I guess a suboptimal-enough implementation can still consume all the CPU cycles it can get and then some.
When I read Robert's article, I see a Steve Woz missing a Steve Jobs.
Also, in the category prehistory (aka 20 years ago), i like to mention the swiss eDonkey/eMule server Razorback2, which was able to serve 500k users (cf the french page https://www.numerama.com/tech/1151-razorback-2-le-retour-du-meilleur.html).
Even if the job is not the same, i still wonder why current routers are only able to handle only several hundreds or thousands BGP peers or IPSec Tunnels: Moore's law exception or loose implementation ?