Yesterday on the irc channel I asked how the Alix board would perform on routing tasks... as I'd like to change my Asus/Linksys metal. And a discussion started with Charles and Harlan; ex: some boards have crypto engines, others not, so wpa in everyday life can change things. After a short search in wiki and forum we saw that there have been a few benchmarking attempts but nothing about routing capabilities of these little boxes. Moreover since the last attempt developers introduced many new platforms - ie: no more broadcom 200mhz devices only.
So we are suggesting to make a new benchmarking attempt (eg: Kamikaze 7.09, no qos-scripts and additional packages, default config, only testing tools included in ufficial OpenWrt distribution). Charles draw this:

http://www.widesol.com/wrtbenchmark/

I also suggested to add some "application tests"; kind of "use cases"; ex: samba, http, scp troughputs; but someone else suggested it would be too complex / time consuming, for people to test. I think that instead could be a good task for newcomers... many approach to openwrt "to give it a try"... and the benchmarking howto could give them a pretty good overview on installing stuff... while contributing with more benchmarking results...

Suggestions? Idea? If any, leave them here; I'll write a new wiki page then; a small howto setup a common testbed and make the tests and the table with the results.

Links:
- Previous benchmarking discussion: http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=5526
- Some existing benchmarks: http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Benchmarks/OpenSSL
- nbd opinion on this new attempt: "routing performance measurements under ideal conditions might indeed be useful; but without qos".

Hi Wallace,

Did you ever find any benchmark results for the Alix boards? I'm looking for precisely the same thing at the moment.

Thanks,

Sam

@Wallace

I'm interested in routing/bridging performance (LAN/LAN, WLAN/WLAN, WLAN/LAN) of different platforms (Alix, Avila Gateworks, Routerboard RB133, RB433, plain old Broadcom hardware). IMHO your setup looks fine; each test should mention the kernel version, WLAN hardware (in case of miniPCI slots).

We should be careful with hardware using VLAN tags towards the switch (for LAN and WAN) as the bandwidth of the MAC could be the limiting
factor for LAN/LAN performance. System (irq) load should be recorded as well, no idea how.

Some Freifunk guys tested a couple of devices using netpipe-tcp some time ago:
http://www.morgendorffer-consulting.de/ … _messwerte (German only).

I'll work on this on an Alix 2c2 after I've got Kamikaze running on it (incl. a Ralink WLAN USB NIC).

On a second look I don't understand this sentence in your drawing:

.

AFAIK WPA support (RC4, RNG, AES) is always located inside the WLAN chipset hardware.
It may not be able to support "line"-speed traffic, through.