3 ms·

I setup a PI with 2 NIC (1 WAN, 1 LAN) + 1 WLAN to act as a router + AP, and I have to tell you its network performance is pathetic. The bottleneck for total ne

I setup a PI with 2 NIC (1 WAN, 1 LAN) + 1 WLAN to act as a router + AP, and I have to tell you its network performance is pathetic. The bottleneck for total network bandwidth was somewhere about 37mb/sec. That's not per interface that's total across all. With WLAN and cheap WAN (Fibre or DSL) far exceeding that -- it's a terrible platform to use for this. Especially if you're anything other than a casual user. The raspi's arm CPU left me with a probably undeserved but less than favourable impression; using qemu to build remotely was also a time consuming annoyance. I ended up building a dual core 3ghz router based on shuttle's XH61V as it integrates dual gigabit NICs + an atheros USB WLAN for AP. Uses 90w of power and boots in < ~4s from SSD, running Linux.

pmjordan 12y ago
90W is rather a lot. I'm looking at the Intel NUCs, which are a lot more compact and power efficient. Downside is that they only come with a single Ethernet port so you need to add any additional ones via USB3.
andreasvc 12y ago
3GHz and 90W is ridiculous for a router. A good NIC does not rely on the CPU, so clock speed should be irrelevant. A Mini-ITX board or a router with OpenWRT would be a much more economic alternative.
- wtallis 12y ago
  A good NIC won't require much CPU power to drive, but in order to have reasonable real-world performance with the networking equipment that actually exists, you need every packet to be handled by the QoS and AQM systems running on the CPU. Doing that at near-gigabit speeds really does require a beefy CPU, though not a full desktop-class wattage.
- Nanzikambe 12y ago
  Well once I decided to go this route I figured take advantage of the opportunity to put a good CPU in it and allow it to take over a number of services that I'd previously hosted on another machine (since retired). It host several services in VMs(dns, transparent HTTP proxy, torrent client running in X11 open via VNC). I also use VPNs quite extensively and seeing as the Intel chip-set doesn't support AES natively, I opted to up the clock speed of the CPU to the highest I could get it without exceeding my budget.

pmjordan 12y ago

90W is rather a lot. I'm looking at the Intel NUCs, which are a lot more compact and power efficient. Downside is that they only come with a single Ethernet port so you need to add any additional ones via USB3.

andreasvc 12y ago

3GHz and 90W is ridiculous for a router. A good NIC does not rely on the CPU, so clock speed should be irrelevant. A Mini-ITX board or a router with OpenWRT would be a much more economic alternative.

wtallis 12y ago
A good NIC won't require much CPU power to drive, but in order to have reasonable real-world performance with the networking equipment that actually exists, you need every packet to be handled by the QoS and AQM systems running on the CPU. Doing that at near-gigabit speeds really does require a beefy CPU, though not a full desktop-class wattage.
Nanzikambe 12y ago
Well once I decided to go this route I figured take advantage of the opportunity to put a good CPU in it and allow it to take over a number of services that I'd previously hosted on another machine (since retired). It host several services in VMs(dns, transparent HTTP proxy, torrent client running in X11 open via VNC). I also use VPNs quite extensively and seeing as the Intel chip-set doesn't support AES natively, I opted to up the clock speed of the CPU to the highest I could get it without exceeding my budget.