Gigabit speed and gear thread

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Gigabit speed and gear thread

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mdooher

Hmm, what to write...
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#1759868 9-Apr-2017 17:41

RmACK:

mdooher: Why not buy a new mikrotik?

Good advice.

I posted a typical speed test back on page 3 with my Mikrotik RB2011. I was consistently seeing about 400Mbps with this extremely cheap router and the best ever was well over 600, (fast path enabled and about 30 firewall rules and 3 different VLANs). Having said that, real world performance seldom comes close, the best I've seen is Steam peaking around 34MiBps so a bit shy of 300Mbps.

As a sort of update generally on my setup on Bigpipe Elite, for a few months I considered upgrading to the RB3011 but these are very expensive and there was no real need. In the end I ditched the Mikrotik for a Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite 3 last weekend as these seem to be the router of choice around here and are 2/3 the prices of the RB3011.

It didn't end up being much of an upgrade in the end, I now see about 600-700Mbps for speed tests (hardware offload for forwarding, PPPoE and VLAN) and it's barely any faster if I rule out the fibre connection, e.g. if I plug my laptop into a guest switch port (different VLAN & subnet) and run iperf to my media PC (traffic must traverse the ERL, router-on-a-stick style to get to other network), then I see 600-800Mbps depending on direction. For comparison, if I plug into a switch port that is on on the same VLAN & subnet (no traversing router, just the switch) iperf clocks about 950MBps in either direction.

Without hardware offloading, the ERL only does about 160Mbps. I see a similar performance hit on the Mikrotik without fast path. FWIW, I found the interface on the ERL a lot simpler than the Mikrotik, but was surprised at how laggy the ERL web & ssh interfaces are compared to the Mikrotik.

I too had an RB2011. I could get around 700Mbps on my IPoE connection to Vodafone. I held off going to BigPipe for ages because Fastpath was not enabled for PPPoE..... anyway I put in my order for BigPipe on the day the RB3011 came into stock. once I set it up I discovered three things.

1 BigPipe will do IPoE

2 Fastpath is now enabled on PPPoE.

oh well...

3 the 3011 looks cool in my rack

Matthew

StNick

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#1759879 9-Apr-2017 18:45

Thank you to everyone that has replied! Leaning towards the RB3011 but I think it makes the most sense to just hold off until my RB951G arrives (I have two actually - perhaps I can use those as my wifi APs around the house and the 3011 as the primary router).

michaelmurfy

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#1759881 9-Apr-2017 18:59

@RmACK I don't know how you were getting problems. The Edgerouter Lite is performing very well on my own connection (3x VLAN's, IPoE and IPv6 along with many firewall rules) and also on a friend's connection (2x VLAN's, many firewall rules, IPv6 and also PPPoE) and am able to get 940-960Mbit down, 480-510Mbit up on both connections.

The latest Alpha (1.9.7 A1) offers better performance in the CLI and web interface but I have not found the performance to be laggy as such, just can take a while to do a commit if you're doing quite a bit. In general, it is a good router and in all my installations has done very well on Gigabit. It sounds like you've got a configuration problem.

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ANglEAUT

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#1759882 9-Apr-2017 19:09

mdooher: Why not buy a new mikrotik?

At an exchange rate of 10 to 1 and being fresh off the boat, spending as little money as possible is always a good idea.

Please keep this GZ community vibrant by contributing in a constructive & respectful manner.

RmACK

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#1759922 9-Apr-2017 20:41

@michaelmurfy I might need to pick you brain some time if that's ok, maybe via PM so as not to hijack this thread.

When I ssh to my ERL3, it takes 21 seconds before it prompts for a password which seems totally ridiculous to me, and the load average is only 0.04. If I create say a new firewall rule via the web interface, when I hit save it takes 12 seconds to save it while the CPU load spikes to 60%. Is this abnormal? It seems totally shoddy to me.

I might put the RB2011 back in so that I can experiment on the ERL without disruption to the rest of the household.

RmACK

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#1759953 10-Apr-2017 00:02

I had another crack at my speed issues on the ERL3 and figured out the root cause.

Eth0 had a standard ethernet MTU of 1500 and PPPoE to MTU of 1492. This caused issues when I first set it up where some websites didn't work. I had kludged a fix that I found online at the time by enabling MSS clamping to 1452 which made things work. Unfortunately I set this for all interfaces back then which is why my inter-vlan traffic has been slow - the router had to fragment it!

Sure enough, removing MSS from all interfaces except PPPoE0 got inter-VLAN up to 950Mbps.

I then read up on MTU to actually understand what I was messing with and as a result raised Eth0 to a MTU of 1508 to allow me to run PPPoE at 1500. I no longer need MSS clamping at all and consistently get speeds close to 700Mbps to Spark Auckland (Bigpipe don't peer here in Chch). Yay for 1500 byte end to end!

StNick

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#1767698 20-Apr-2017 08:49

Just an update on this... My routers arrived (I have two RB951G). I set the one up as an AP and the other as the router, hopefully to offload some of the CPU work.

The absolute highest result I've seen on Speedtest.net is 800mbps, but it doesn't feel like that is realistically achieved often. I have a dedicated server in Europe which is on a gigabit connection and I can only achieve about 120mbps from there when downloading a file, even using multipart. Strangely, the CPU isn't maxed - it just doesn't want to go faster than 120mbps. If I dial the PPPoE connection directly from my laptop, I still get about 800mbps on Speedtest, but the server download jumps to 400mbps! I'm so confused - if the CPU isn't maxing out, what is the bottleneck?

In any event, it's clear that the RB951G is under-powered for the task and I am looking at upgrading to the RB3011. But forum posts like this one (https://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=112534) don't fill me with confidence that even the RB3011 will be able to get me the full line speed!

How is it that a cheap consumer-grade router like the Huawei HG659b can easily achieve full line speed without flinching?

Basically by the end of the day, I will have ordered the RB3011 or given up on Mikrotik entirely and just gone with somethign like the Netgear R7000 for easy-of-use and the benefit of 802.11ac thrown in.

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darylblake

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#1767734 20-Apr-2017 09:39

StNick:

Just an update on this... My routers arrived (I have two RB951G). I set the one up as an AP and the other as the router, hopefully to offload some of the CPU work.

The absolute highest result I've seen on Speedtest.net is 800mbps, but it doesn't feel like that is realistically achieved often. I have a dedicated server in Europe which is on a gigabit connection and I can only achieve about 120mbps from there when downloading a file, even using multipart. Strangely, the CPU isn't maxed - it just doesn't want to go faster than 120mbps. If I dial the PPPoE connection directly from my laptop, I still get about 800mbps on Speedtest, but the server download jumps to 400mbps! I'm so confused - if the CPU isn't maxing out, what is the bottleneck?

In any event, it's clear that the RB951G is under-powered for the task and I am looking at upgrading to the RB3011. But forum posts like this one (https://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=112534) don't fill me with confidence that even the RB3011 will be able to get me the full line speed!

How is it that a cheap consumer-grade router like the Huawei HG659b can easily achieve full line speed without flinching?

Basically by the end of the day, I will have ordered the RB3011 or given up on Mikrotik entirely and just gone with somethign like the Netgear R7000 for easy-of-use and the benefit of 802.11ac thrown in.

800Mbps is a great speed. My friend has an RB3011 on a Business Max plan (to his house). 1G/1G and achieves about 930~940Mbit. Which is about the absolute max you are going to get. I wouldn't bother wasting your money unless you have a lot of clients behind the router.

StNick

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#1767740 20-Apr-2017 09:48

Agreed, 800mbps is fantastic. But real-world speeds (for example, a 10-thread download from my European server) is in the region of 120mbps. If I dial PPPoE from Windows, it is 400mbps. So I cannot help but feel that I am losing out on up to 4x real-world speed here....

MrIrish

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#1768085 20-Apr-2017 19:23

Just ran a Speedtest that I am reasonably happy with.

I live in Dunedin, hence the larger ping. For those interested, I am running a TPLink Archer C9.

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