Hi All, These are the results I've had with the USB3 Ethernet adaptors listed in the title. N150 Acemagic Vista V1. I used the appropriate RTL and AX plug-ins.
RTL8153. Reaches virtually the available ~900Mbps download and upload available on my fibre. crashes occasionally under load. Fail!
AX88179. Limited to 250Mbps, but reliable. Fail!
RTL8256BG. Reaches the available bandwidth. Seems reliable depite my attempts to break it with speed test, Teams etc. Win!
With various packages like a blocklist in Unbound, Crowdsec and Intrusion Protection turned on, the most CPU useage I see is 20%. Memory, far less than 1G. My reason for switching from my recent TP-Link AX73 device is mainly because their firewall setting is now an android-controlled paid app. So I have that set up as an AP with an RE705 extender located in the other end of the house. That gives me reliable +-800Mbps over wifi(6) tapped into the extenders Gigabit port.
I hope this is of use to others.
Thank you for testing and reporting your findings but IMHO any kind of USB Networking on your OPNsense is simply wrong and not something you want to use for a long time : Any kind of (temporary) High CPU LOAD = The whole USB Bus starts tripping!
But you can keep them and use them in case any of your Clients suddenly has a NIC gone bad/defect :)
Thanks for the rapid feedback. I saw several warnings about this online. However, I had the hardware laying about (apart from the 8256) which didn't stand me for much money.
Getting a dual NIC X64 PC etc with a half decent CPU in it would be a bigger investment. I have some DDR 3 laying about somewhere though, which would help a lot these days.
If it all goes die-down (geddit) or otherwise, I'll feed back.