The University of Wales at Aberystwyth has done quite detailed tests and put their results on the web.
Even a 486 can handle a T1 line, according to this mailing list message:
Subject: Re: linux-ipsec: IPSec Masquerade Date: Fri, 15 Jan 1999 11:13:22 -0500 From: Michael Richardson . . . A 486/66 has been clocked by Phil Karn to do 10Mb/s encryption.. that uses all the CPU, so half that to get some CPU, and you have 5Mb/s. 1/3 that for 3DES and you get 1.6Mb/s....
and a piece of mail from project technical lead Henry Spencer:
Oh yes, and a new timing point for Sandy's docs... A P60 -- yes, a 60MHz Pentium, talk about antiques -- running a host-to-host tunnel to another machine shows an FTP throughput (that is, end-to-end results with a real protocol) of slightly over 5Mbit/s either way. (The other machine is much faster, the network is 100Mbps, and the ether cards are good ones... so the P60 is pretty definitely the bottleneck.)
Here is some additional data from the mailing list.
Subject: FreeSWAN (specically KLIPS) performance measurements
Date: Thu, 01 Feb 2001
From: Nigel Metheringham <Nigel.Metheringham@intechnology.co.uk>
I've spent a happy morning attempting performance tests against KLIPS
(this is due to me not being able to work out the CPU usage of KLIPS so
resorting to the crude measurements of maximum throughput to give a
baseline to work out loading of a box).
Measurements were done using a set of 4 boxes arranged in a line, each
connected to the next by 100Mbit duplex ethernet. The inner 2 had an
ipsec tunnel between them (shared secret, but I was doing measurements
when the tunnel was up and running - keying should not be an issue
here). The outer pair of boxes were traffic generators or traffic sink.
The crypt boxes are Compaq DL380s - Uniprocessor PIII/733 with 256K
cache. They have 128M main memory. Nothing significant was running on
the boxes other than freeswan. The kernel was a 2.2.19pre7 patched
with freeswan and ext3.
Without an ipsec tunnel in the chain (ie the 2 inner boxes just being
100BaseT routers), throughput (measured with ttcp) was between 10644
and 11320 KB/sec
With an ipsec tunnel in place, throughput was between 3268 and 3402
KB/sec
These measurements are for data pushed across a TCP link, so the
traffic on the wire between the 2 ipsec boxes would have been higher
than this....
vmstat (run during some other tests, so not affecting those figures) on
the encrypting box shows approx 50% system 50% idle CPU - which I
don't believe at all. Interactive feel of the box was significantly
sluggish.
I also tried running the kernel profiler (see man readprofile) during
test runs.
A box doing primarily decrypt work showed basically nothing happening -
I assume interrupts were off.
A box doing encrypt work showed the following:-
Ticks Function Load
~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~
956 total 0.0010
532 des_encrypt2 0.1330
110 MD5Transform 0.0443
97 kmalloc 0.1880
39 des_encrypt3 0.1336
23 speedo_interrupt 0.0298
14 skb_copy_expand 0.0250
13 ipsec_tunnel_start_xmit 0.0009
13 Decode 0.1625
11 handle_IRQ_event 0.1019
11 .des_ncbc_encrypt_end 0.0229
10 speedo_start_xmit 0.0188
9 satoa 0.0225
8 kfree 0.0118
8 ip_fragment 0.0121
7 ultoa 0.0365
5 speedo_rx 0.0071
5 .des_encrypt2_end 5.0000
4 _stext 0.0140
4 ip_fw_check 0.0035
2 rj_match 0.0034
2 ipfw_output_check 0.0200
2 inet_addr_type 0.0156
2 eth_copy_and_sum 0.0139
2 dev_get 0.0294
2 addrtoa 0.0143
1 speedo_tx_buffer_gc 0.0024
1 speedo_refill_rx_buf 0.0022
1 restore_all 0.0667
1 number 0.0020
1 net_bh 0.0021
1 neigh_connected_output 0.0076
1 MD5Final 0.0083
1 kmem_cache_free 0.0016
1 kmem_cache_alloc 0.0022
1 __kfree_skb 0.0060
1 ipsec_rcv 0.0001
1 ip_rcv 0.0014
1 ip_options_fragment 0.0071
1 ip_local_deliver 0.0023
1 ipfw_forward_check 0.0139
1 ip_forward 0.0011
1 eth_header 0.0040
1 .des_encrypt3_end 0.0833
1 des_decrypt3 0.0034
1 csum_partial_copy_generic 0.0045
1 call_out_firewall 0.0125
Hope this data is helpful to someone... however the lack of visibility
into the decrypt side makes things less clear
Here is a message from FreeS/WAN kernel programmer Richard Guy Briggs on this:
> I have a batch of boxes doing Freeswan stuff. > I want to measure the CPU loading of the Freeswan tunnels, but am > having trouble seeing how I get some figures out... > > - Keying etc is in userspace so will show up on the per-process > and load average etc (ie pluto's load) Correct. > - KLIPS is in the kernel space, and does not show up in load average > I think also that the KLIPS per-packet processing stuff is running > as part of an interrupt handler so it does not show up in the > /proc/stat system_cpu or even idle_cpu figures It is not running in interrupt handler. It is in the bottom half. This is somewhere between user context (careful, this is not userspace!) and hardware interrupt context. > Is this correct, and is there any means of instrumenting how much the > cpu is being loaded - I don't like the idea of a system running out of > steam whilst still showing 100% idle CPU :-) vmstat seems to do a fairly good job, but use a running tally to get a good idea. A one-off call to vmstat gives different numbers than a running stat. To do this, put an interval on your vmstat command line.and another suggestion from the same thread:
Subject: Re: Measuring the CPU usage of Freeswan Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2001 From: Patrick Michael Kane <modus@pr.es.to> The only truly accurate way to accurately track FreeSWAN CPU usage is to use a CPU soaker. You run it on an unloaded system as a benchmark, then start up FreeSWAN and take the difference to determine how much FreeSWAN is eating. I believe someone has done this in the past, so you may find something in the FreeSWAN archives. If not, someone recently posted a URL to a CPU soaker benchmark tool on linux-kernel.