[gbil]

I'm many years away from such topics but I don't remember this being the case, moreover specs for net equipment was (is) on pps with the details stating usually 2-3 packet size categories. I'm interested on some reference on what you wrote

[Hikikomori]

https://www.fmad.io/blog/what-is-10g-line-rate

As the article calls it, the gold standard. If a device is capable of forwarding/switching packets at the smallest packet size line rate on all interfaces at the same time you don't have to think too much about its performance when designing your network. Haven't worked much with hardware for a few years but it was common that Cisco switches were not capable of this.

[Dylan16807]

Gold standard sure, but that doesn't make it the definition of line rate.

[nsteel]

Vendors I've seen usually use one of a few "standard" packet size mixes e.g. imix. Nobody uses smallest size frames because nobody can hit their headline perf numbers for that, and it's not representative of real-world usage anyway.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mix

[Hikikomori]

I think this applies more to firewalls used for simple internet connections than switches/routers.

[nsteel]

I was specifically talking about enterprise/core routers where the packet processing can be non-trivial and small frames hurt performance.

[Hikikomori]

What core routers uses imix?

[nsteel]

Not sure what you mean, but an example of using imix to measure perf of a core router is Cisco 8000 series https://miercom.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Performance-V...

[Hikikomori]

That 8200 for example is capable of line rate at the smallest packet size so that imix marketing is kinda useless. When evaluating these kinds of devices this is what matters.

IMIX makes sense on devices that are not capable of small packet line rate like firewalls where bandwidth is much more costly and need to be sized appropriately.