Tuesday, June 3, 2014

PC Engines WRAP.1E2 vs ALIX.6B2

Testing WRAP 1E2 and Alix 6B2, both were running pfSense 2.0.1

This firewall box is setup has a standalone OpenVPN server, running off of 1 NIC(LAN), Encryption is AES-256.





Here are my results for 1 user through the VPN on both box's and some spec's:


Label WRAP.1E2 ALIX.6B2
CPU Usage: 51.00% 56.00%
Memory Usage: 48.00% 22.00%
Download Speed(Mbps): 3.1 10.65
Upload Speed(Mbps): 0.48 0.51
Ping Time(ms): 20 11
CPU   : 233 MHz AMD Geode SC1100 CPU 500 MHz AMD Geode LX800
DRAM: 128 MB SDRAM 256 MB DDR DRAM
NIC's  : 3 2
USB   : 0 2
Other : 1 Mini PCI 1 Mini PCI + 1 Mini PCI Express + On-board SIM Slot

The point of this post was to show the throughput of the VPN on the hardware and whether or not I needed a Soekris Crypto Card or if the hardware upgrade was enough. This is just a post I made a while back but never submitted for some reason. Since then I have tried running VPN on a Linux server, DD-WRT router, and Mikrotik router. While this is PC Engine is great firewall and VPN server in one, I am trying to minimize the amount of device's I have powered on. I'll be making a post about the Mikrotik wireless router soon, this has firewall, VPN, WiFi and many more features.

2 comments:

  1. Hi

    Great review. Any idea why up is soslow

    Have you seen this note: https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Are_cryptographic_accelerators_supported

    Looks like this may improve your porfornace 10-20% all else being equal

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, I saw that. I don’t think you need that crypto card unless your CPU usage is constantly high(70%+). I was about to buy that card but decided it wasn’t worth it. The upload is slow because its the max speed from my internet provider, I should of mentioned that in the review. Download speed was not affected by this.

      Delete

Thanks for your input.

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