Bird and cpu clock / cores.

[Mike Neo]

Hello!
I need to configure a simple BGP router to support 1-2 full BGP peers and
one IX peer.
The total traffic supported is 1-2 Gbps.

I'm planning two BGP routers based on Ubuntu + Bird (version 2 or 3).
Each router has two Intel X520-DA2 cards, one CPU, and 32GB of RAM.

I'm considering:

1. CPU:
- 8x2.2 GHz or 4x3.8 GHz, or maybe something else?
- should I run HT or not?
2. Architecture: iBGP + VRRP or VRRP only?
3. Which Bird version?

Anything else I should think about?

Kind regards,
Mike

niedz., 2 lis 2025 o 16:20 Maria Matejka <maria.matejka at nic.cz> napisał(a):

> Hello!
>
> On Sun, Nov 02, 2025 at 07:05:42AM +0100, Mike Neo wrote:
>
> As far as I understand it, BIRD 3 implements multithreading by allowing
> different protocol instances or routing tables to run on separate worker
> threads, but each individual bgp protocol instance itself still operates
> mostly in a single-threaded manner. Right?
>
> Yes, every individual bgp protocol instance indeed runs in a single
> thread, and there is no good reason to split it because most of the time
> it’s the network which is slower than BGP.
>
> If you run just several bgp instances, you don’t need to care about the
> performance at all, even if you load a full table from all of them.
>
> As soon as you start running many bgp instances, you may use more threads.
> Yet, in the end it may be best to say what is your expected load and we may
> then tell you what may be the performance chokepoints and how many threads
> may work for you.
>
> Have a nice day!
> Maria
>
> –
> Maria Matejka (she/her) | BIRD Team Leader | CZ.NIC, z.s.p.o.
>
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