Hi,

Here is my x86 router configuration:

OS: FreeBSD 10.2 64bit

Bird 1.6.3

CPU Intel E5-2609v2

Memory 16GB

Here is top result for bird:

27 processes: 1 running, 26 sleeping

CPU: 13.0% user, 0.0% nice, 1.8% system, 1.7% interrupt, 83.6% idle

Mem: 504M Active, 112M Inact, 875M Wired, 518M Buf, 14G Free

Swap: 3852M Total, 3852M Free

PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND

6278 root 1 52 0 455M 440M select 3 1:23 20.65% bird

6294 root 1 20 0 60124K 48616K select 0 0:24 0.10% bird6

bird> show route count

1356504 of 1356504 routes for 633512 networks <<-- still updating the routing table after restarting protocols

Your hardware is more than enough but if you consider to handle high traffic or packets per second it's a different.

Best regards,
David S.
------------------------------------------------

e. david@zeromail.us
w. pnyet.web.id

p. 087881216110

On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 8:57 PM, Clément Guivy <clement@guivy.fr> wrote:

Hello, I am considering the setup of BIRD as a router to handle our internet traffic. One information I fail to find is hardware requirements. My use case is as follows :
-          Two transit providers, each sending a full internet view
-          Two peerings on an IXP (less than 100k routes each)
-          One iBGP session between the two BIRD routers
-          One eBGP session to our internal network (advertising a default route and receiving less than 500 internal routes)
-          Traffic would be less than 1Gbps but as I understand it, this is relevant to forwarding plane and therefore out of the scope of BIRD.

Which kind of hardware would be fit for that ? especially regarding CPU and RAM. I was considering an entry-level server with low-end Xeon CPU (E5-2603, 1.7Ghz 6 cores) and 8GB RAM, does that look sufficient, insufficient, or overkill ? I can’t really tell. By the way, is BIRD able to use multiple cores ? and are there hardware requirements to be careful of, disregard CPU and RAM ?

Thanks.

Regards,

Clément Guivy