Running OpenWRT on an early Pentium 4 machine?
Running OpenWRT on an early Pentium 4 machine?
If you're heading for ARM, a consumer router seems more practical. You gain WiFi access and an integrated switch. I've found RPi restrictive—only one Ethernet port available, so you'd need a smart-managed switch to match a consumer router's features. I also prefer avoiding USB Ethernet adapters because even minor delays aren't acceptable.
I'm still weighing my options and thinking about which one fits best. The latency isn't terrible for online gaming, but it should be solid enough for everyday home use. Having just one Ethernet port makes sense since most devices connect wirelessly. I already have a spare unmanaged 100 Mbps switch available, which could be useful if I decide to set up a NAS later. Overall, opting for the router seems like the best choice right now.
That's a powerful router you've built, isn't it? It really does draw a lot of energy.
It's possible to deploy OpenSSL on a virtual machine for your server. The latency might be better than with an EdgeRouter Lite, though it could still be higher.
The CPU of the ERL was about maxed out at 100% load when downloading games with my xbox or when doing speedtests even without going traffic over the VPN connection. The resulting slowdown wasn't much because it would still reach the nominal limit of the internet connection. With opnsense that goes smoother and also a tiny bit faster as it now looks as if the limiting factor isn't the router anymore whereas the ERL was right on the edege of what it could manage. Latencies also seem a little lower. It's like the difference between running your own name server on your LAN compared to having to wait until a request goes out to an external name server and then having to wait until the answer arrives. Ping times to the VOIP provider are now between 7.5 and 8ms, and I think they were more like about 10ms before. That's beyond measuring because it can be different tormorrow. I have found that, under the same conditions, file transfers over a wireguard link with opnsense were about twice as fast as with pfsense. (I tried pfsense first but when I found that the manufacturer has moved over to non-free software, I switched to opnsense.) I don't have this comparison to the ERL. So when it comes to bandwidth and latency, it's almost all subjective, and I can only assume that more powerful hardware plus perhaps things like package queues being optimized better (to reduce latency perhaps) make an enjoyable difference. There is no looking back. One thing I learned from this is that the internet connections we can nowadays get, if we're lucky, make it advisable to pay very close attention to whatever router and firewall solution you use.
I chuckle at my aunt's modest 300 Mbps ISP GPON device (probably the HG8245) handling ten devices at once. It’s clear you can’t even stream YouTube smoothly while four people enjoy it. Ten years ago, I had only 240p and a slow wireless router that still works, often causing buffers. Even then, I’d let my laptop run nonstop for days without shutting it down for a 7 GB download. Now I grumble excessively when Steam downloads under 2 MB/s (the peak is 4 MB/s with cellular and tethering). I also get frustrated when I accidentally triggered a 2 GB update for Steam by mistake, especially during long work hours. Interestingly, I noticed speeds of up to 9 MB/s while tethering an old router. Clearly, the tethering was limiting performance—now I’m finally using an Android STB box as a decent router.
Android box needs a minimum quad-core ARM v8 or higher processor running at 1Ghz to 2Ghz with at least 1-2 GB of RAM. A consumer router typically runs a MIPS single-core chip at 600MHz with 64-128 MB of memory. The performance gap is significant. To match the Android TV Box specs in a router would require around $300, which usually means you're looking at an enthusiast-level device like Turris Omnia.