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?
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I am saddened to see that this thread had no mention of how many horses it takes to run a router. What do y’all think? Would one be enough? It would need to work in shifts to keep up time at 100%. Maybe 3 to be safe?
This is why I came here. I think you’d need at least three. One to work while the other sleeps, and a spare in case one gets injured.
3 horses = 3 horsepower, which translates to a whopping 393.6 Duckpower.
Honestly, why are we still using horses as the standard here? Ducks are clearly the superior metric. So if you’re like me and prefer a more feathered approach, just remember:
3 horses = 3 horsepower = 393.6 ducks You’re welcome.
(PS: Just imagine 393.6 ducks handling 10Gb… now that’s efficiency.)
(quoting from wikipedia) In 2023 a group of engineers modified a dynometer to be able to measure how much horsepower a horse can produce. This horse was measured to 5.7 hp (4.3 kW)
Switches and routers are pretty low-power, so we could probably get away with some form of body heat -> electricity thing. Or a battery and put the horse on a treadmill every so often.
Neither 10G multiport routers nor L3 wirespeed switches are low power. We’re looking at 100+ W to multiple hundred watts. In 1U these are rather screamy.
I think it was 66~ watts for my Layer 3 8 port 10Gb switch, and Router in use.
That’s pretty good. Which models are these?
many people just buy junk like this https://www.amazon.com/Mikrotik-Router-Switch-CRS305-CRS305-1G-4S/dp/B08437RDM1 it’s cheaper in the long run.
You will need a good 10Gb nic, I have been using Intel nic’s if you use a Intrusion Prevention System that can eat away at the CPU, also more RAM helps like 8GB’s or more for IPS, I use 16GB’s for IPS + ZFS and a nice Switch can help a lot as it can do DNS and the works, more or less i use a firewall box to a Switch and use a Layer 3 Switch for routing, some can do 20+Gb’s routing.
I can only look at Mikrotik gear in jealousy since they don’t have a reseller here, so all that’s available are overpriced, un-warrantied gray imports…
Mikrotik make good hardware, what are you on about?
they do make some good hardware, just this one they cheaped out on and used 16MB’s of Storage, it really hobbled the device.
The product you linked is a cheap fanless 10G layer 2 switch. It’s ok for the price, as fanless 10G enterprise switches are hard to get used.
There are suitable 10G capable Mikrotik routers however. This one, for instance: https://www.amazon.de/MikroTik-RB5009UPr-S-IN/dp/B0BBW159WW If you want wirespeed 10G routing on two or more ports it’s going to get expensive and/or noisy fast. A good compromise is a single 10G port router in a router on a stick mode used with a cheap 10G layer 2 switch.
The one i linked is both a router and or switch, you can get cheap switches for like $300 that do really well.
Wire speed L2 in hardware is cheap, but layer 3 is not (and is typically limited to few k routes for campus type of switches). I have a Quanta LB 10G and a Brocade ICX 1G/10G/40G switches for lab use, which are hot and screamy but were cheap used. I would not trust software L3 implementations to not drop packets at high rates.
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.
$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.
