ER-X, where next ?

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elkabong

New Member
Apr 4, 2021
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Hi All,

I've been running an er-x and unifi sw8 with vlans for some time. The vlans are all running from the er-x with the unifi trunked to it.
Till recently i never noticed the bottle neck in my setup. If i'm copying a large file from my pc which sits on vlan 100 to my nas which sits on vlan 200, i noticed that the max throughput i was seeing was around 100mbps up and down. This is far below the performance of the nas, which i double checked by moving the pc into the same vlan and conducting a speed test there resulting in around 500mbps up and 800mbps down.

What affordable setup is out there ? Should i be looking at something like the ER12 as it has an 8gbps "backplane" to replace the er-x ?
Perhaps an affordable SMB Layer 3 switch ? Or potentially making the er-x a layer 2 switch and using an old i3 nuc with pfsense ?

Thanks for reading.
 

sagra

New Member
Apr 27, 2020
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If the bottleneck is 100mbps, is it possible you have a 100mbps link between the switch and router?

On the ER-X you need to enable hardware acceleration to reach gigabit speeds. Certain features (e.g QoS) don’t work with hardware acceleration. The 12 should be an improvement, not so much for the backplane, it’s just got a much faster processor. I’m not sure how the switch works on the high port count edgerouters. If it’s L3 and can handle inter VLAN traffic, that could be a nice performance benefit. I suspect it’s more likely a L2 switch so all the inter VLAN stuff still has to go through the router hardware. If that’s the case, then an ER-4 connected to your existing switch would get you similar performance to the 12.

Personally, I upgraded from the ER-X to an x86 box running VyOs. Both VyOs and EdgeOs are Vyatta descendants so the CLI is familiar.
 
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Guillem

Member
Nov 13, 2017
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As @sagra suggests make sure to enable vlan hw offloading, otherwise performance will be crappy. With that enabled, it should perform way beyond 100Mbps (as long as it is all properly linked at 1Gbps). Maybe you won't reach 1Gbps but should be at least 500-600 if I remember properly.
 

elkabong

New Member
Apr 4, 2021
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Thanks for the suggestions. All connections are 1gbps and fortunately i'd already enabled hardware offloading.
I might be running too many vlans for this little box to handle tbh. I did a lot of digging and it's only rated at 1gbps for the processing. Plus vlans are only handled in the software, so no offloading there :(
The cpu spikes to around 40% when copying large files across vlans.
It's looking like i'll install an edgeswitch lite to handle the vlans instead. So rather than a router on a stick i'll run a "core" network instead.
Internet <--> ERx <--> Edgeswitch <--> Vlans
 

Guillem

Member
Nov 13, 2017
70
22
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I realized based on your response that the ER-X does not have a HW VLAN offloading feature as the ER lite or ER Pro have, so yeah, you won't be able to offload more than HWNAT and IPSEC as far as I remember.

On the other hand though, the ER-X is based on a switch chip, the MT7621A, so you can use all ports or just a bunch of them as a switch (this can be set both on the UI and on the CLI) and then you should be able to achieve pretty much full speed on lan transfers as long as you stay within the switch.

So ideally, you would want to keep your wan port as an independent port, not belonging to the switch, and then all other ports attached to the switch config in the ER-X and managing the VLANs as a switch.

There is a bit more info about the configurations as a switch here:


With that setup, you would have a pretty similar situation to what you were describing but without requiring an edgeswitch: Internet <-> ERx (doing vlans as a switch)