900Mps FTTP PPPOE is this suitable?

[TomT]

Hi,
I'm looking at buying one of these to connect via PPPOE to a 900Mbps/100Mbps FTTP circuit.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004360072281.html

I'll add 16GB ram and 128GB SSD.

Does anyone see any issues with this, or could suggest a better alternative.

Thanks

[hushcoden]

The N100 should suffice.

[TomT]

Thanks

[TomT]

I'm now live on my 1000/115 FTTP.
Speed tests using the ISP router are approx 940 / 110

When I use my existing opnsense server this drops to 600 / 110.

CPU usage shows:
https://imgur.com/a/jLMfnFm

It does look like a single core is being consumed.
Will an N100 cope with this ?

Thanks

[meyergru]

Easily. Provided you configure RSS.

[TomT]

Thanks. What's RSS ?

[meyergru]

https://docs.opnsense.org/troubleshooting/performance.html

[TomT]

Thanks, I've read that and I'm still none the wiser!

[meyergru]

Your CPU load shows that the load is not distributed over the CPU cores, but instead uses only one of them. That is because you did not enable RSS, which, according to the very first sentence in the link I gave you:

is used to distribute packets over CPU cores using a hashing function

So what exactly is it that you do not understand?

[hushcoden]

Just follow the instructions:

Go to System -> Settings -> Tunables and add:

1) Enable multi threads

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net.isr.maxthreads=-1
2) Enable bind threads

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net.isr.bindthreads=1
3) Enable RSS

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net.inet.rss.enabled=1
4) Set the value of net.inet.rss.bits
       

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- for 4-core systems, use '2'
- for 8-core systems, use '3'
- for 16-core systems, use '4'
- etc.

[TomT]

Your CPU load shows that the load is not distributed over the CPU cores, but instead uses only one of them. That is because you did not enable RSS, which, according to the very first sentence in the link I gave you:

is used to distribute packets over CPU cores using a hashing function

So what exactly is it that you do not understand?

Thanks. I thought PPPOE only used a single core and there was no way to change that.
Thats why I was looking at the N100 as it has a faster single core speed.

Is that wrong ?

[meyergru]

No, but even the N100 will reach its limit if you use VPN, traffic shaping or IPS and not make sure that the load can be distributed over multiple cores. Also, the single-thread problem has much improved since the FreeBSD 14.1 kernel. For example, this is my load while doing a speedtest download at 1100 MBps:

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last pid: 18638;  load averages:  1.53,  1.09,  1.03             up 1+18:44:33  16:33:52
125 processes: 2 running, 123 sleeping
CPU 0: 39.2% user,  0.0% nice, 39.2% system,  1.6% interrupt, 20.0% idle
CPU 1: 44.7% user,  0.0% nice, 33.3% system,  0.4% interrupt, 21.6% idle
CPU 2: 40.8% user,  0.0% nice, 25.5% system,  6.3% interrupt, 27.5% idle
CPU 3: 52.2% user,  0.0% nice, 16.1% system,  4.7% interrupt, 27.1% idle
Mem: 1706M Active, 2909M Inact, 191M Laundry, 6843M Wired, 56K Buf, 3952M Free
ARC: 5213M Total, 2605M MFU, 2300M MRU, 22M Anon, 61M Header, 220M Other
     4651M Compressed, 21G Uncompressed, 4.66:1 Ratio

And that is an N100.

[TomT]

Thanks that is very helpful.

I already have the first two parameters set, I'll enable the last one.
I have a new N100 mini pc coming tomorrow, so I'll set it up and see how I get on.

Thanks

[TomT]

New box is in and configured with the suggested tunables.
So far it looks good.

Speedtests seem good, may be 20/30Mbps slower than the ISP router.
Resources are find, CPU is staying pretty idle under load.

Any tips for tweaking the last bit out of the connection ?

Thanks