We tested Quagga 0.99.4 on Gentoo Linux (kernel v2.6.15) running on both a Dell 2850 and a Dell 1550. The Dell 2850 has two Intel Xeon 3.6GHz processors with hyperthreading and 1024MB of RAM and two 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet ports.

The Dell 1550 has a single PIII 933MHz processor with 256MB of RAM and two 10/100Mbps Ethernet ports. We also ran the tests on a Cisco 2621 with two 10/100Mbps Ethernet ports and a Nortel 5520 with 48 1000Mbps Ethernet ports for comparison.

We used a Spirent Communications Smartbits 6000 chassis load with 3301A Terametrics 10/100/1000Base-T cards for all test runs. We used Smartflow for most tests and TeraRouting Test v5.0 for all the routing convergence tests.

We measured Layer 3 throughput by finding the maximum throughput without loss in a bidirectional two port-pair with all ports in full duplex mode at the fastest supported link speed. The test is repeated for seven packet sizes (64 bytes, 128 bytes, 256 bytes, 512 bytes, 1,024 bytes, 1,280 bytes and 1,518 bytes).