Anybody have any docs or performance figures for how much CPU is "enough" for routing/firewalling a given amount of bandwidth?
My current core router (Debian box with an i3-4160 and a dual 10G NIC plus some 1G interfaces) is getting long in the tooth and doesn't have enough PCIe lanes to add all the stuff I want, so I'm planning its retirement some time later this year.
I'm targeting ~10 year lifetimes for new builds at this point, so it needs to have the oomph to last through a bunch of network upgrades.
I'm thinking I would be happy with something that could handle 40G or 100G cross-vlan traffic (plus a few hundred Mbps to/from the internet but that's negligible) in a router-on-a-stick configuration.
But I have no idea how much CPU you actually need to do this. Currently eyeing a Xeon 5416S (EDIT: or a 5415+ which is half as many cores but significantly higher Fmax) somewhat arbitrarily, but I have no idea if this is overkill or insufficient.
