DSA performance

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

I'm looking at WiFi access points and routers that have a built in switch. My network will look like this:

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My pfSense router only has two ethernet ports, so I will use VLANs to divide the network up. The internet connection is 1000/1000 (although it only has a single gigabit port), and everything else is gigabit.

I was going to use a separate managed switch and WiFi AP, but I realized that I could combine the two into one device and save some money/electricity. The plan is to run OpenWRT on a Wifi AP/router.

I see that OpenWRT supports DSA for the switches in some devices. What is performance like with VLANs enabled? Assuming that the pfSense router is not the bottleneck, will I be able to handle 1000mbps between the VLANs and the router?

From what I have read it seems like performance depends on how much can be handed off to the hardware, but I couldn't see anything about what hardware performs best in that regard.

Thanks for any advice.

2

As long as you're only looking for forwarding/ splitting out the individual VLANs, this can be offloaded to the switch fabric and works at full wire speed - L3 features (that would need CPU assistance) depend on the performance of the SOC and device as a whole (generally far from wire speed); this applies to both DSA and swconfig.

2 Likes
3

Thanks, that's great. So it doesn't really matter which model I get? They are all pretty much the same as long as it's only L2 features?

4

mostly true