QOS Performance question
-
What performance can i expect from a system with processor Intel I3-4130 3.4 gigahertz, 8 gigabytes DDR3SDRAM 1600 megahertz?
I have Gigabits Ethernet cards (2), and obviously a separate one on the MOBO for my WAN. My Internet connection speed is 1Gbps down, and 50Mbps up.The reason i am asking this is because the alternative to running pfSense would be an EdgeRouter, but I know that their maximum would be around 300/400 Mbps -although that speed may be enough.
-
The network cards seem to play more of a role than the CPUs in most general cases. I have a 3.3ghz I5 and it can do 1.4M pps around 17% cpu. I was just speedtesting on my 250Mb/s connection that has a from-idle burst of about 500Mb/s for several seconds, and when over 400Mb/s, pfSense was hanging around 5% cpu at 800mhz(powered clock scaling).
On the other side of the scale, you can find people having performance issues reaching 1Gb/s with 6 core Xeon CPUs because they use cheap NICs. I have a $130 NIC. Probably overkill, but one less thing to worry about.
the single most important part of a NIC is driver support. The second is interrupt management features. Depending on your situation, offloading features for vlan handling can be important.
-
@harvy66
I see. I have purchased an intel I350 (Quad NIC). They are advertised at 1gbps. The one on the WAN is from the Dell Optiplex motherboard, but i believe I can just use one of the 4 on the I350, and/or one of the other 2 single ones i have, both Intel Gigabits.
So, if everything is configured as it should, I should be able to achieve around 400Mbps.Thank you for your answer. Much appreciated!
-
I have an i350-T2. It's freaking awesome. I hear for 10Gb to use some other brands like Mellanox or Chelsio, but Intel server nics are great for 1Gb.
-
@harvy66
Great! I hope it comes with low profile brackets.... the description says it should. if that checks out, i'm ready to go!