OpenBSD 6.9 Router Benchmarks

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2021-05-22 02:00:03

I've been using OpenBSD for my home router/gateway for years, and have run it on a number of different types of hardware. I recently got Verizon's gigabit service which is advertised at up to 940 Mb/s download and 880 Mb/s upload speeds, so I decided to benchmark some of the routers I have laying around. The contestants are:

All of these routers are running OpenBSD 6.9 and are set up exactly as described in the Building a Router FAQ page. There are lots of tweaks people do for performance, but I did not test any of them. What you see in the guide is what you get. CPU frequency was set at the maximum via apmd, where applicable.

Testing was done from a T14 running Ubuntu 20.04 with 3 runs at Speedtest.net using the Vultr speed test server. This is not perfect as it only tests web traffic, so smaller or larger packet sizes than what you find in web traffic are not tested, nor is UDP tested either. Since this is going to an external server outside my network, it also sends that traffic over other carriers, so some of this is at the mercy of the route. But this is not meant to be scientific, and probably represents how most people will use their router anyway.

The EdgeRouter Lite has a small ASIC onboard for packet forwarding which is used by Ubiquiti's EdgeOS. OpenBSD does not use this at all, so all of this was done by the two 500 MHz cores. One interesting thing is that the EdgeRouter 4 was signifcantly faster than the APU4, beating it by about 100 Mb/s. Despite the fact that both have four 1 GHz cores, the Octeon apparently moves packets around better than the AMD Jaguar. The fastest in the list is unsurprisingly the Xeon powered Supermicro E300, and it likely can go faster, but the connection may have been the limitation here.