Advice for new user - APU2C
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Dear All,
Would like some advise regarding the performance of the APU2C board, does the board support a 500MBps/20Mbps WAN connection (PPoE) as running speed tests the max attainability is always around 330 - 350Mbps. Performing the same tests using a VM running on a mac mini results in the full 500Mbps being attained. Is there some kernel module one needs to load if such speeds are supported by the device?
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Forgot to mention that snort is running in both tests, ( I also disabled the snort service and the results were basically the same on the APU board) , do you know of any small form factor boards that would support a 500Mbps WAN connection please?
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The APU2C is capable of forwarding traffic in the range ~650 Mbps with some firewall and NAT rules.
Snort is quite resource-intensive, so no matter what platform you go to:
If you want to do proxying/caching, a small-form-factor platform is probably the wrong choice.How exactly are you testing this?
Going to speedtest.net and similar pages is not a reliable test and will not actually show you how your hardware performs. -
Was basically running it trough speedtest.net with snort VRT rules enabled ( Connectivity rule set ), didn't try iperf to be honest
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If you run a speedtest and get one speed and you change the configuration and get a lower speed, the speed test is accurate enough. If you've got PPPoE @500Mpbs the APU2 is probably not the right choice for a pfsense platform (which is having problems balancing the igb receive queues and the pppoe processing across all the cores). If you've got the hardware and want to use it you may have better luck with a linux based firewall, otherwise you can throw hardware at the problem. And why do ISPs do such stupid things as pppoe?
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To be honest, the APU2C4 is cracking for what it can handle.
I have a 320/20 connection, and to be fair it handles it very well with Snort running on 3 interfaces with a decent amount of rules added - I get my full connection speeds.
However, FreeBSD is the limiting factor in terms of interface throughput. Throughput between two interfaces is roughly 550 - 650Mbps. However, if you are to run a Linux based OS such as Sophos UTM then the throughput is ~950 between two interfaces.
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Was basically running it trough speedtest.net
IMO a more reliable WAN speed test can be found at http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest
