[Shorewall-users] OT: Routing vs Bridging - Performance

[Simon H. <li...@th...>]

I know it's off-topic for this list, but I imagine someone on here 
might have some ideas :

At work we have a 2mpbs line and I have a box doing traffic shaping 
('wondershaper using htb) and accounting (254 addresses, in and out) 
as a bridge (ie we simply stuck it between the network and the ISP 
provided router). This box is a 1GHz Celeron.


We are upgrading to a 6mpbs line, and have the opportunity to run the 
gateway box as a router instead of a bridge. I built the new box with 
a 1GHz Pentium III.

However, the new box cannot route packets at full line speed - even 
with accounting and traffic shaping disabled. We tried it with a 
server that's 'between jobs' at the moment, a 2GHz, dual quad-core 
Intel something - that can route the packets and count them, but 
still can't handle the traffic shaping.


I have a couple of questions :

1) Does anyone know if there is any significant different in 
performance between routing and bridging packets in Linux ? Ie, if I 
reconfigured this new box as a bridge and sourced a different box to 
do the routing, would it be likely to handle the traffic better ?

2) Am I right in thinking that routing/accounting/shaping lots of 
packets won't use multiple cores effectively ? So we'd be better of 
with a faster single core machine ? We have a quote for a new box 
(2GHz Xeon) but we don't want to shell out and find it still can't 
cope.

ANy ideas greatfully received.