F5F Stay Refreshed Power Users Networks Can I use a question switch problem as well?

Can I use a question switch problem as well?

Can I use a question switch problem as well?

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brobear7
Posting Freak
892
10-09-2026, 06:15 AM
#1
Here is some stuff happening in our data center job site. My router is basically just a regular 1U computer running Linux that has two lines, one for the outside world and one for my servers inside. It sends public internet addresses to all my other computers on the network. This setup runs on a 1Gigabit connection where both the router and switch have ports that can handle gigabits per second. For about a year now, everything has been working fine, but suddenly I've got way more customers, so something is breaking with speed. My router sends data really fast almost at full capacity, but when I check my own computers inside the building, sometimes they only get 300 Mbps or less depending on when I test. Sometimes it's under 100 Mbps. But if I check from a server deep inside the network, the speed is fine. The problem happens only when trying to send data to the internet or back to the router. That makes me think something is wrong with the switch port or the LAN line on my router. Is there a limit on how many connections the switch can handle? Or maybe one of those ports is broken? It's not just about having too much raw speed because I used to have plenty of it before. It seems like the number of people trying to connect at once has something to do with it, so which part of this setup is most likely causing the problem?
B
brobear7
10-09-2026, 06:15 AM #1

Here is some stuff happening in our data center job site. My router is basically just a regular 1U computer running Linux that has two lines, one for the outside world and one for my servers inside. It sends public internet addresses to all my other computers on the network. This setup runs on a 1Gigabit connection where both the router and switch have ports that can handle gigabits per second. For about a year now, everything has been working fine, but suddenly I've got way more customers, so something is breaking with speed. My router sends data really fast almost at full capacity, but when I check my own computers inside the building, sometimes they only get 300 Mbps or less depending on when I test. Sometimes it's under 100 Mbps. But if I check from a server deep inside the network, the speed is fine. The problem happens only when trying to send data to the internet or back to the router. That makes me think something is wrong with the switch port or the LAN line on my router. Is there a limit on how many connections the switch can handle? Or maybe one of those ports is broken? It's not just about having too much raw speed because I used to have plenty of it before. It seems like the number of people trying to connect at once has something to do with it, so which part of this setup is most likely causing the problem?

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Melon_Gaming
Junior Member
12
10-11-2026, 10:54 AM
#2
Are you using consumer grade equipment for your network? The trouble with enterprise level stuff is that it's much more complicated and prone to misconfigurations. Most switches are usually non-blocking wire speed devices, but this isn't always true if you have a lot of 10Gbit ports. This means every port can run at the full rated speed both up and down all at once. So if you have a consumer grade switch with eight ports, it could pass a total of sixteen gigabits of traffic, even though there is no real-world case where this much data would be used. This makes it more likely that your router has an issue. A cheap consumer router actually has an advantage over a PC here. Consumer routers have a feature that allows all the overhead of rebuilding headers when NAT happens to be offloaded to a hardware chip rather than the CPU chip, but you can do this on a PC too. Consumer routers can pass full one gigabit traffic from WAN to LAN, but if you turn off that feature, speeds drop to about three hundred to four hundred megabits per second. But the power in a PC should be able to handle just doing NAT. The problem is most people who use a PC as a router are doing it for some reason like they want firewall rules or maybe traffic monitoring. All of this takes up CPU power. If you put in say a lot of rules, it can get limited. The number of active sessions shouldn't matter much unless the number is excessive, so think thousands. Then again, this is just memory and CPU usage, and that's why people use a PC rather than a consumer router. The number of physical connections doesn't mean anything much since the router only sees one thing. It might see all the MAC addresses, but it will take massive numbers to overload things like ARP tables. I would check your resource utilization in the router or PC to see if you are hitting limits. Be aware that many router functions can only use one core, so be careful when looking at CPU usage.
M
Melon_Gaming
10-11-2026, 10:54 AM #2

Are you using consumer grade equipment for your network? The trouble with enterprise level stuff is that it's much more complicated and prone to misconfigurations. Most switches are usually non-blocking wire speed devices, but this isn't always true if you have a lot of 10Gbit ports. This means every port can run at the full rated speed both up and down all at once. So if you have a consumer grade switch with eight ports, it could pass a total of sixteen gigabits of traffic, even though there is no real-world case where this much data would be used. This makes it more likely that your router has an issue. A cheap consumer router actually has an advantage over a PC here. Consumer routers have a feature that allows all the overhead of rebuilding headers when NAT happens to be offloaded to a hardware chip rather than the CPU chip, but you can do this on a PC too. Consumer routers can pass full one gigabit traffic from WAN to LAN, but if you turn off that feature, speeds drop to about three hundred to four hundred megabits per second. But the power in a PC should be able to handle just doing NAT. The problem is most people who use a PC as a router are doing it for some reason like they want firewall rules or maybe traffic monitoring. All of this takes up CPU power. If you put in say a lot of rules, it can get limited. The number of active sessions shouldn't matter much unless the number is excessive, so think thousands. Then again, this is just memory and CPU usage, and that's why people use a PC rather than a consumer router. The number of physical connections doesn't mean anything much since the router only sees one thing. It might see all the MAC addresses, but it will take massive numbers to overload things like ARP tables. I would check your resource utilization in the router or PC to see if you are hitting limits. Be aware that many router functions can only use one core, so be careful when looking at CPU usage.