In order to decrease CPU LOAD over routerboard OS I have managed to disable all services (except telnet - I need to manage the board!!!), and the connection tracking. With these down I have managed to USE a full A link without CPU hitting 100% CPU utilization. I need to further decrease CPU load so MRTG stats is something I want also to take down, but I can’t find a way. ALSO SNMP is something I don’w need/want so another point is to kill that also.
Any ideas?
Also I would gratly appreciate any other suggestions on how to further decrease CPU load.
The connection tracking is producing high loads especially when multiple tcp connections are engaged. With one tcp connection the result may be about the same, but with multiple connections the effective bandwidth was raised around 2-3 Mbit per second. [tested with a custom made threaded java app that creates multiple tcp connection on both ends and measuring the efficiency of the network infastructure. Client / server model]
Furthermore there are many answers to your question (rhetorical maybe):
Lower cpu load reduces the current that cpu draws thus stalling the aging effect on CPU
Less consumption
Less heat
greater efficiency on other more demanding CPU tasks (OSPF)
and the philosophical question: Why even bother running something you will never use; In your linux distro are you running mysql.apache ldap,nfs,vnc,X when you are not using them?
All the above are not the issue here. My inquiry was specific.
Your points, even rhetorical, are noted. As I see which device is placed where, these “low end” boards have specific places in our network and would not gain higher ground should their efficiency increase by some small percentage. We use ROS on the edge but with custom x86, not RBs. These are left for CPEs and the like. Someday we’ll be able to identify just which processes really jack the CPU on different platforms.
While this response doesn’t help answer your question, I at least understand where you are heading with the second post. ROS is a Swiss army knife that can be a little heavy. I recently built a kernal for a very lean client. After adding all the goodies I’ve come to expect from ROS; it wouldn’t fit on the flash I had allocated. Then we bought more level 4s.
