My old setup was:
VSDL modem -> pfsense on mini J1900 Celeron (2 GHz) -> CISCO SG300 10MPP switch -> Rukus R310 wifi -> Laptop
Currnet setup
Fiber model -> pfsense on mini J1900 Celeron (2 GHz) -> CISCO SG300 10MPP switch -> Rukus R310 wifi -> Laptop
Today i got my 1GBit fiber installed (big deal for those like me living in rural areas) only to discover that my current network setup is not allowing me to benefit from it.
I was on VSDL copper wire before and was probably in the region of 50-60 MBit/s with my above current setup. Even when removing the wifi bottle and linking with Cat5 UTP wire directly to switch, I’m not getting major improvements.
When I got the fiber installed this morning I was disappointed when I saw only marginal gain running at 80 MBit/s (c. +30 MBit). So I decided to connect the laptop via LAN cable directly to modem. I got a starkling 900MBit/s. So, along my network I have bottlenecks.
THe first one I tested was my little pfsense machine. I installed the speedtext-cli command and was surprised to find that it was giving my around 300 MBit/s. So a lot better than my laptop on its usual wifi connection but still only 33% of what I get directly off the modem.
So my first question is how can it be that my little mini J1900 Celeron (2 GHz) with 4 GB RAM cannot handle this bandwith? Do I need an upgrade for my pfsense machine? I noticed that the peak CPU demand as speedtest-cli was running was in the 60% region, far from a saturated CPU and RAM only occupied for about 30%. If it is my little pfsense machine, how far do I have to go with finding the right little machine that can handle 1 GBit/s.
The next question is if I’m getting 300 MBit/s on the WAN connection of the pfSense machine, how is it that I only see a small percentage of this on my laptop? i.e. a drop from 300 MBit/s to 80 MBit/s? I guess I would have to test the switch to start and then move to the wifi access points …
I have been using similar hardware setups in A LOT of installations. This is mostly an issue with the pfSense hardware. There’s a lot of decent options around $200, mostly focus on getting a modern CPU (if it supports AES-NI there’s a good chance it will be fine). A lot of them have 2.5g nics these days too.
Sadly, sg300 line is also getting pretty old. In recent years I’m seeing more and more issues with them, especially in the models with poe. Sg350 is even eos now, with cbs350 being the current.
I’m also now using r610 as the absolute minimum ruckus ap. I was using r510 for a long time, but the r610 has noticable improvements.
Any thoughts on a good little fanless device that I can use as a pfSense machine that has a resonable CPU. I would just swap the SSD from my curent device to the new one and it should all work nicely.