GigaRouter Latency?

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1

Now I know a lot of people are going to jump on me for raising the
latency question here, and I don't want to inflate its importance at all.

Latency in a router is only somewhat important for most network
applications but on some applications it has a very serious effect. If
anyone would like to flame me, please do it in private email and I am
sure I will find the time to get back to you :).

How does the latency through a Gigarouter compare to the latency of say a
NetBSD or FreeBSD box with (say) FDDI interfaces. [Ignoring the fact that
most BSD boxes are running on a single PCI bus]. Basically I am curious
how much advantage/disadvantage one gets by going from a Cisco to a
Gigarouter solution based on issues like latency. I am sure the
difference we are talking about is very slight and <2ms total, I just
want to get an idea and I don't trust most of the technical sales
personnel I have talked to to get a straight answer. I am very familiar
with the latency of BSD (typical) boxes and those of Cisco Routers.

Thanks,

-Deepak.

2

Ok, it is MUCH lower through the Gigarouter. We were using FreeBSD systems
for our routers, but are moving to the Gigarouter for bandwidth and speed.
We started out netrail with cisco 4000s, but soon ran our of ram. We then
had to go to a 7000 just so we could get 64 megs of ram. We thought it was
lame to buy lots of cisco 7000s for only ram (we did not need the
bandwidth of T3 yet). So we built our own routers, and saved lots of
money. I like the Gigarouter because it is very close to my design of a
router (I had this crazy idea of building our own routers/interface cards)
and like the speed and idea.

Nathan Stratton CEO, NetRail, Inc. Tracking the future today!