EdgeRouter Lite Performance Tests

Starting with two laptops connected to one ERL each. ERLs both running 1.5.0.

Laptop A <-> ERL <-> ERL <-> Laptop B
192.168.20.100 <-> 192.168.20.1 192.168.1.2 <-> 192.168.1.1 192.168.10.1 <-> 192.168.10.10020141010_22362

 

I’m using OSPF to expose these two networks to each other for this test. See EdgeRouter Lite Simple OSPF Guide

iperf results from one laptop to the other:

$ iperf -s
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 4] local 192.168.10.100 port 5001 connected with 192.168.20.100 port 42797
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 1.10 GBytes 940 Mbits/sec
[ 4] local 192.168.10.100 port 5001 connected with 192.168.20.100 port 42820
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 4] 0.0-100.0 sec 11.0 GBytes 941 Mbits/sec

 Near wire. Great!

 Next we’ll remove the OSPF routing and setup an IPSec tunnel between the two an retest.

I used the GUI’s IPSec site-to-site feature to set this up. Here’s what it generated:

vpn {
    ipsec {
        auto-firewall-nat-exclude enable
        esp-group FOO0 {
            compression disable
            lifetime 3600
            mode tunnel
            pfs enable
            proposal 1 {
                encryption aes128
                hash sha1
            }
        }
        ike-group FOO0 {
            lifetime 28800
            proposal 1 {
                dh-group 14
                encryption aes128
                hash sha1
            }
        }
        ipsec-interfaces {
            interface eth0
        }
        nat-networks {
            allowed-network 0.0.0.0/0 {
            }
        }
        nat-traversal enable
        site-to-site {
            peer 192.168.1.2 {
                authentication {
                    mode pre-shared-secret
                    pre-shared-secret ****************
                }
                connection-type initiate
                ike-group FOO0
                local-ip 192.168.1.1
                tunnel 1 {
                    allow-nat-networks disable
                    allow-public-networks disable
                    esp-group FOO0
                    local {
                        subnet 192.168.10.0/24
                    }
                    remote {
                        subnet 192.168.20.0/24
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

And the results with IPSec hardware offload disabled.

'set system offload ipsec disable'

[ 4] local 192.168.10.100 port 5001 connected with 192.168.20.100 port 44600
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 4] 0.0-100.1 sec 718 MBytes 60.2 Mbits/sec
[ 4] local 192.168.10.100 port 5001 connected with 192.168.20.100 port 44601
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 72.5 MBytes 60.5 Mbits/sec

And with IPSec hardware offload enabled.

'set system offload ipsec enable'

[ 4] local 192.168.10.100 port 5001 connected with 192.168.20.100 port 44586
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 180 MBytes 151 Mbits/sec
[ 4] local 192.168.10.100 port 5001 connected with 192.168.20.100 port 44590
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 179 MBytes 150 Mbits/sec
[ 4] local 192.168.10.100 port 5001 connected with 192.168.20.100 port 44596
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 4] 0.0-100.0 sec 1.75 GBytes 151 Mbits/sec

Not bad!

However, even with IPSec enabled, load average increases a good bit when pushing max data through the IPSec VPN

jdrews@ERL10:~$ uptime
 10:23:23 up 23 min, 1 user, load average: 0.58, 0.66, 0.47

Compared to without pushing data

jdrews@ERL10:~$ uptime
 20:47:29 up 10:47, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05

While this didn’t seem to affect the usage of the router, it is a little worrying. I don’t have any firewalls or other services enabled on the router. What happens when we take this into the real world? It’s worth noting that this is a dual core router, so really that’s only 1/4 of total processing power.

2 thoughts on “EdgeRouter Lite Performance Tests”

  1. How did you reach those IPsec site-to-site speeds? My 2 ERL never comes close to that and maxes out around 10 Mbps both on IPSec and OpenVPN.

  2. Hello! This looks very interesting! Could you tell me which Software (EdgeOS Version) your were running on those ERL’s?

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