Soekris net6501 and Openbsd, network performance trouble

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Corsaire

New Member
Feb 3, 2018
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0
1
I have a homemade router made with a Soekris net6501 running Openbsd (actually 6.3).

Lately I was very suspicious about my internet connection, my contract is a gigabit fiber (well at max gigabit speed, not gigabit guarantied), but in the facts my numerous tests shows me that I am on a 100mbps basis.

I found all this very strange and investigated further.

The straw that broke the camel back is when I tried to connect my laptop directly on the ONU and run a speed test... I got immediately figures as high as 550-600 mbps, now we're talking.

Going deeper I found that the bottleneck was my soekris router, which is very strange.
The Soekris net6501 is equipped with a 4 ports intel 82574L, more than capable to do a gigabit networking.

Since the LAN-WAN link definitely won't go over 100mbps I tried to have a look at the routing process, disabling PF did not yield any difference.
Then running iperf between a machine in my LAN and the corresponding port on the Soekris did not gave any more luck...

Code:
$ iperf -s
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  4] local 192.168.14.102 port 5001 connected with 192.168.14.1 port 19202
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  4]  0.0-10.0 sec   142 MBytes   119 Mbits/sec
So, I have ports detected as 1000Mb, but unable to go over 100Mb.

Running iperf on another machine with the same hardware but running Linux gave a much different result
Code:
$ iperf -s
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  4] local 192.168.14.102 port 5001 connected with 192.168.14.103 port 54804
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  4]  0.0-10.0 sec  1.08 GBytes   926 Mbits/sec
Yes, gigabit at last.

Ultimately I asked to a friend that have an identical setup to do the test and he also freaked at the results... same shit.

Do anyone around have a Soekris machine running Openbsd and have the same trouble ?
 

Corsaire

New Member
Feb 3, 2018
21
0
1
So after some research and tests I found the reason,
even if it's a good little machine, a net6501-30 with its 600MHz Atom CPU is too light to handle gigabit traffic.

In my previous comment the machine going full speed was actually a net6501-70, so 1.6GHz CPU.

Hope this can give a hint to other people around if facing some performance issues.