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?

  • MercuryGenisus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    20 days ago

    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?

    • huskypenguin@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      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.

      • y0din@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        20 days ago

        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.)

        • scholar@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          15 days ago

          (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)

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      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.

      • eleitl@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        18 days ago

        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.