My internet connection is getting upgraded to 10 Gbit next week. I’m going to start out with the rental router from the ISP, but my goal is to replace it with a home-built router since I host a bunch of stuff and want to separate my out home Wi-Fi, etc onto VLANs. I’m currently using the good old Ubiquiti USG4. I don’t need anything fancy like high-speed VPN tunnels (just enough to run SSH though), just routing IPv6 and IPv4 tunneling (MAP-E with a static IP) as the new connection is IPv6 native.
After doing a bit of research the Lenovo ThinkCenter M720q has caught my eye. There are tons of them available locally and people online seem to have good luck using them for router duties.
The one thing I have not figured out is what CPU option I should go for? There’s the Celeron G4900T (2 core), Core i3 8100T (4 core), and Core i5 (6 core). The former two are pretty close in price but the latter costs twice as much as anything else.
Doing research I get really conflicting results, with half of people saying that just routing IP even 10 Gbit is a piece of cake for any decently modern CPU and others saying they experienced bottlenecks.
I’ve also seen comments mentioning that the BSD-based routing platforms like pfSense are worse for performance than Linux-based ones like OpenWRT due to the lack of multi-threading in the former, I don’t know if this is true.
Does anyone here have any experience routing 10 Gbit on commodity hardware and can share their experiences?
I am saddened to see that this thread had no mention of how many horses it takes to run a router. What do y’all think? Would one be enough? It would need to work in shifts to keep up time at 100%. Maybe 3 to be safe?
This is why I came here. I think you’d need at least three. One to work while the other sleeps, and a spare in case one gets injured.
3 horses = 3 horsepower, which translates to a whopping 393.6 Duckpower.
Honestly, why are we still using horses as the standard here? Ducks are clearly the superior metric. So if you’re like me and prefer a more feathered approach, just remember:
3 horses = 3 horsepower = 393.6 ducks You’re welcome.
(PS: Just imagine 393.6 ducks handling 10Gb… now that’s efficiency.)
(quoting from wikipedia) In 2023 a group of engineers modified a dynometer to be able to measure how much horsepower a horse can produce. This horse was measured to 5.7 hp (4.3 kW)
Hmm, is that waddling or flying power? Swimming?
Also, the only reason for the 3 horsepower is so the others can rest, so we’d probably need far fewer than 393.6 ducks, I think we could get away with <100, provided we can manage their sleep cycles properly.
Alright, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of Duckpower.
First, let’s settle the “waddling vs. flying vs. swimming” debate. Horses aren’t big on flying, so we’re talking waddling power here. Until someone locates a Pegasus, we’re limited to the traditional land-bound horsepower. If you want swimming power, I guess you’d need to measure a seahorse?
Now, here’s where it gets serious: according to the brilliant minds at Art of Engineering, we can calculate Duckpower using a clever formula. They took the mass of a duck, compared it to a horse, and ran it through Kleiber’s Law. The answer? One horsepower = 131.2 Duckpower. So, back to our math:
3 horsepower = 3 x 131.2 Duckpower = 393.6 ducks waddling their hearts out.
But wait! We probably don’t need all 393.6 ducks if we give them some solid shift schedules. Horses only get 3 HP so two can rest; following this logic, we’d only need around 100 well-rested ducks, provided they get naps and stay hydrated.
So, let’s optimize our duck workforce with a shift schedule. Assuming we only need 100 ducks, here’s the plan:
Duckpower Shift Schedule:
Total Ducks: 100
Working Ducks per Shift: 25
Shift Duration: 2 hours on, 6 hours off (plenty of time for snacks and naps)
In a day, we’d run 4 shifts like this:
Shift 1: 25 ducks start strong at 8:00 AM, waddling with purpose.
Shift 2: Fresh 25 ducks take over at 10:00 AM while Shift 1 ducks hit the ducky lounge for snacks and a nap.
Shift 3: At 12:00 PM, another 25 ducks clock in to keep those wheels turning.
Shift 4: Finally, at 2:00 PM, the last 25 ducks take over while the others catch up on R&R.
With this cycle, each duck works only 2 hours out of every 8, staying energized, waddling at peak efficiency, and ready for action.
TL;DR: 3 horsepower = 393.6 ducks waddling but if we set up a 4-shift system, we can pull this off with only 100 ducks working 2 hours each, plus snack breaks.
We also need to consider the practical aspects. Who mucks after the horses? Who feeds them? Do we need a stall? Does it need to be air conditioned in the summer/winter?
Considering a typical horse produces about 1-14 HP*, it’s possible to run the horse for several hours at a time, change a battery, and run an efficient router off of it each day.
*sauce: https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/how-much-horsepower-does-a-horse-have
Horsepower is a very rough “average” of work output over a given period of time. It doesn’t really account for spikes in load. For that we’ll have have to consider the torque. So the real question is, how many foot/pounds or newton/meters does OP need to handle 10 gigs of throughput?
Switches and routers are pretty low-power, so we could probably get away with some form of body heat -> electricity thing. Or a battery and put the horse on a treadmill every so often.
So we built big tanks with a lever system like a piston on your car. Fill the left piston with water. With a small hole in the middle. For flow. If you do the math right you get the horse to walk up the stairs and stand on that piston(header really) the water drops slowly all day forced out of the hole spinning a turbine translating to electricity, preferably a battery. Horse never has to go down stairs thankfully, just back up the stairs to the other side. Moving from one side~ 3 meters every 12 hours should do it.
Basically, horse bed one side. Horse day lounge area other
Ooh, sounds quite practical. Would work even better with a cow, and you’ll get milk out of the deal too!
Neither 10G multiport routers nor L3 wirespeed switches are low power. We’re looking at 100+ W to multiple hundred watts. In 1U these are rather screamy.
I think it was 66~ watts for my Layer 3 8 port 10Gb switch, and Router in use.
That’s pretty good. Which models are these?
Here are two somewhat reasonable routers that support 10G (via 2 SFP+ ports):
Both have max power draw under 50W, though I don’t know what they’d actually draw (would depend on how much traffic and whatnot).
And here’s a switch with 2 SFP+ ports with max draw of 11W: https://mikrotik.com/product/css610_8g_2s_in.
Interesting. Wonder how much horsepower they have in the L3 department.