My internet connection is getting upgraded to 10 Gbit next week. I’m going to start out with the rental router from the ISP, but my goal is to replace it with a home-built router since I host a bunch of stuff and want to separate my out home Wi-Fi, etc onto VLANs. I’m currently using the good old Ubiquiti USG4. I don’t need anything fancy like high-speed VPN tunnels (just enough to run SSH though), just routing IPv6 and IPv4 tunneling (MAP-E with a static IP) as the new connection is IPv6 native.
After doing a bit of research the Lenovo ThinkCenter M720q has caught my eye. There are tons of them available locally and people online seem to have good luck using them for router duties.
The one thing I have not figured out is what CPU option I should go for? There’s the Celeron G4900T (2 core), Core i3 8100T (4 core), and Core i5 (6 core). The former two are pretty close in price but the latter costs twice as much as anything else.
Doing research I get really conflicting results, with half of people saying that just routing IP even 10 Gbit is a piece of cake for any decently modern CPU and others saying they experienced bottlenecks.
I’ve also seen comments mentioning that the BSD-based routing platforms like pfSense are worse for performance than Linux-based ones like OpenWRT due to the lack of multi-threading in the former, I don’t know if this is true.
Does anyone here have any experience routing 10 Gbit on commodity hardware and can share their experiences?
I have 10Gbit and hunted that whale. But I didn’t build my own router. Electricity is $0.51 Kw/h. Ouch.
First, 10Gbit hardware is more available now than years ago, so you have more options. I started off with the router my ISP gave me. It worked, but it was 1Gbit. Not going to do for me. Plus, basic function was paywalled. Booooo! Snagged a broken Asus router and got it working great.
With IDS/IPS enabled, I get about 3.5Gbps. There is newer router tech today that looks interesting with fewer bottlenecks that would have been nice years ago, but not worth the upgrade right now.
My desktop hits about 2Gbps downloading Steam games/updates, but my partners desktop lags behind with SATA SSD storage. Definitely need NVME with that speed.
I will say my experience with 10Gbit Ethernet cards is not positive. I have a lot of intermittent disconnections and there are a lot of bugs vs 1Gbit switches. They do not like sharing with 2.5Gbit devices. I keep my server on 1Gbit connections. It’s plenty fast for my needs though.
The low power consumption is one of the reasons I was attracted to the ThinkCenter M720q devices. It definitely wouldn’t be worth it if I had to build some tower PC or run a Xeon server!
The ISP router I’m getting is 10 Gbit (on WAN and one LAN port, the rest are 1 Gbit), but the configuration seems limited and it’s a $5/mo rental tacked onto the bill.
I think I can live without IDS/IPS, in all the time I used it on UniFi, it never gave me any actionable info, so hopefully that helps me with performance.
That’s interesting about the 10Gbit ethernet cards. Is that with something like a Mellanox or some other card? My NAS is going to be stuck on 2.5 Gbit since it’s just a Synology.
$0.51/kWh?! Where on earth is that?!
Hah, that’s rookie numbers man…we just hit $1.2USD/kWh the other day during the “dinner rush” between 5pm-9pm
That’s insane! I pay a flat US$0.11/kWh, and if I wanted to go peak/off-peak it would be $0.15/0.06!
Yeah it’s pretty crazy…prices vary by the hour, and that was only the single most expensive hour in that period though, and it was way above normal. Normally it peaks around 0.35USD/kWh with normal daytime prices around 0.2USD/kWh and nighttime prices around 0.1USD/kWh.
My total electricity consumption in the 5-9pm period is only around 2kWh though, so despite high prices it’s not much money.