Does the router have an impact on internal connection speed?

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

Hello there!

This is a more general and fundamental question about network traffic in a situation like this:

Internet (50 MBit)
↳ Router/Gateway (OpenWRT) (100 MBit)
  ↳ Switch (1 GBit)
    ↳ all internal servers and working machines (1 GBit)

In other words: the router is connected to the slower ISP port on one side and to a much faster switch on the other side. All internal machines are connected to that switch and according to the status indicators at the switch they are all running at 1GBit.

The router acts as a firewall and internal name server.

My question is this: can this 100 MBit router with its limited CPU speed have any negative impact on traffic speed between internal machines? For example: if a desktop machine downloads files from a server, and both devices are connected to the switch, will the router slow down that traffic? Will every traffic be routed through the OpenWRT device or will the internal machines connect to each other directly via the switch?

I am sorry if this is a much too easy question for real network specialists. :wink:

But I'm asking this question because I am experiencing a massive drop of speed in a scenario like this and I am looking for possible reasons: when Thunderbird accesses its huge mail directories on a server, the desktop sometimes freezes. Using improper hardware may be one of the reasons, so I'd be very thankful if some one could give me some hints on this one.

Many thanks in advance!

2

The latter, unless you're using VLANs which would require the router to be involved (to route between them).

I'd suspect the issue is the 'huge' part of that sentence. It'll probably be freezing while it tries to load/cache the data into memory.

1 Like
3

Thanks for your quick response!

Actually, there are VLANs involved, but the machine, that is freezing when Thunderbird gets going, and the server are both inside the same VLAN. So there shouldn't be any routing necessary. Or am I wrong there?

That is one other possibility I am trying to investigate. But the machine that freezes is a Octa-Core equipped with 32 GB of memory. If TB really manages to completely occupy that amount of memory, it would be time to look for an alternative MUA.