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?

  • kalleboo@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    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.