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?
Core i3 is fine, celeron can route, but you don’t have as much headroom, or room for firewall rules, etc. Recommend Intel x520 or mellanox cx3 or newer, though the cx2 is perfectly fine.
The bs about bsd being slower is maybe 15 years old at best?
Bsd is a monster for routing.
Run 25gbe routing, still can get by on your 4 core, but I throw some serious xeons at it anyway.
Thanks for the Intel x520 recommendation, those are looking like a much better deal right now than the Mellanox cards I was looking at.
Glad to hear it about the BSD networking!
I’m still trying to avoid the Xeons for power consumption reasons, hehe, although it would be a lot more fun for sure!