[tlug] high load for pppoe w/B-Flets

[Shimpei Yamashita <shimpei@example.com>]

So I finally got my B-Flets connection working last week. Woo-hoo!

I'm very happy with the connection itself, but the CPU load taken up
by the PPPoE driver is making me a bit worried. With four download
connections a-going, totalling about 2MB/s, top(1) reports the pppoe
process to be taking up as much as 8% to 10% of the CPU time. That
isn't fatal, but I have a hard time understanding why the PPPoE driver
needs 8% to 10% of a 1.4GHz Athlon's CPU time just to push 2MB/s data
around the memory!

Is software PPPoE always going to be this expensive? I have other, less
well endowed machines that I also want to hook up to the network.
Having to cope with this load *is* going to be pretty painful for
the likes of a laptop PII/233. Am I better off buying one of those
broadband routers that speak PPPoE? [1]

The machine in question is running Debian sid, hand-built kernel 2.4.18,
and the pppoe driver version is 3.3-1.1 (Debian supplied).

[1] Using the Athlon box as a gateway is not an option, as the Athlon
goes down occasionally to let me play games and use *gasp* Microsoft
Office. Windows 98 doesn't do gatewaying to any great efficiency the
last time I checked.

-- 
Shimpei Yamashita                               http://www.shimpei.org/
You can't have everything. Where would you put it?    -- Steve Wright