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 …

  • Corngood@lemmy.mlEnglish
    69·
    29 days ago

    Have you checked all the ethernet links are actually connected at 1G and not 100M?

    • hendrik ✅@palaver.p3x.de
      22·
      28 days ago

      FYI: Lots of the managed switches or the expensive wifi access points should be able to show the link status in their webinterfaces. It should be pretty easy to figure out if they’re running at 100M. (Sometimes also some LEDs light up in a different color.)