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Comment by als0 | Hacker News Reader

What's the throughput like on a Raspberry Pi?

I was only able to get ~60mbps with OpenVPN through a hard wired Raspberry Pi 3 connected to Google Fiber, due to limitations of its bus.

The 4 is supposed to be actual gigabit, but I have not yet tried it out to confirm.

I'm trying to set it up on a RPI4 as an 802.11ac wireless router, to verify this. If it manages 100mbps+ then it'll be a cheap replacement for my current router.

Are you keeping a write-up of your progress anywhere? Would love to see how this turns out.

Not yet; but that's a good idea. Thanks for the nudge :)

are you using OpenWRT or something else?

Starting with Ubuntu for now, and hostapd.

OpenVPN is extremely slow, same setup with wireguard is guaranteed to be much faster.

Raspberry Pi 3 can do at least 250 Mbps. Perhaps it's limited by something else, like crypto or your actual connection?

Not the original Pi 3B, you're thinking of the 3B+. https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/articles/raspberry-pi-3-specs-...

I just ran iperf from my Pi4 to my Ubuntu VM in the same LAN five minutes ago. 850 Mbps symmetric with no VPN.

I get 940 Mbps for two devices on the same switch.

Which bus limits to 60mbps? The USB limitation shouldn't be anywhere near that low.

I don't know, but you get the extra limitation of USB2 being half duplex. USB2 is something like 480mbps. Add half duplex limitations and just general overhead compared to theoretical max. I can see how some network protocols become limited to 60mbps.

The USB bus on those is shared with all devices

True. It does depend what else you are doing with the pi. Something like a USB hard drive could account for that poor performance, especially if you were upload from/downloading to it.

I’ve been using a pi3 for about a year as a full time VPN on my cell phone and laptops.

3 is only 100mbit eth, but I’ve had almost no issues with it. Connects fast, no problem streaming HD video or cloning huge git repos. Maybe when I get home today I’ll take some measurements.... But my biggest issue is the trash Powerline Ethernet between my router and rest of my network.

I have issues with my wireless signal just crapping out from out of nowhere from time to time. Usually in specific spots in my home. I setup a repeater (thinking a mesh network might be the better choice, but this was a much cheaper temporary solution) but it still sometimes happens. The ethernet is fine on the other hand.

I run OpenHAB and Pi-Hole all on a RPi3 on ethernet, no issues so far.

Here is someone's benchmark from reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/WireGuard/comments/eeafds/wireguard... (tl;dr "Avg: 829 Mbps")

That's for a Raspberry Pi 4, which should have a pretty drastic performance difference from the Raspberry Pi 3 mentioned in the article since only one of those has proper gigabit Ethernet.

It does seem pretty good though. I'm having trouble getting past 25 Mb/s in, 100 Mb/s out on my Edgerouter X.

Sure but that article was about using it on a LTE connection and the GP was asking about Pi in general. In the articles setup it's going to be bottlenecked on the cellular network anyway.

(The Pi 3 also is 4 years old now and you wouldn't want to buy it today)

Rpi 3b has proper gigabit Ethernet though.

Edit: 3B+. My bad.

"faster (300 mbps) Ethernet"[1]

[1]: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3775

It's basically a 1 Gbps PHY connected to 480 Mbps USB 2.0, so it's 240 Mbps Ethernet.

It doesn't.

Edit: It doesn't.

The 3B+ does though, IIRC (w/ PoE support too)

It doesn't. The ethernet is connected to a USB 2.0 bus. Yes the link trains at 1 gbps, but it's limited by the slow bus.

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