NAT performance RTL8380

I am currently experimenting with Netgear gs308t switches for a lab setup (various snapshot from the last few weeks).

I've configured NAT and am getting extremely slow uplink speeds (around 20Mbps).
I know this is not the most powerful chipset, and that development is still ongoing - but I was wondering if this is the performance level that I can expect from RTL8380 devices, or is there some feature which would enable more "usable" speeds? (The CPU load doesn't seem all too high - so the bottleneck might be elsewhere)

It's a switch, not a router (and advanced offloading features are still pending and mostly apply to rtl839x and rtl93xx, much less to rtl838x).

Thanks for the reply! I'm aware that it is a fairly basic switch. I just wanted to get an guesstimate on the expected performance, and also to find out what the limiting factor is for NAT.

I've read about other OpenWrt switches can achieve a few 100 Mbps without any offloading capabilities.

There are no other OpenWrt switches, rtl838x is the first supported switch SOC (with rtl839x and rtl93xx, both with more offliading capabilities than rtl838x, under development).

Other OpenWrt supported devices are predominantly routers (and therefore optimized for that), with a basic onboard switch - just enough to separate WAN and LAN on the cheap.

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This is true but completely irrelevant. You need to look at the specific hardware, and in particular the CPU cores and the ethernet block/driver. A "switch" based on an MT7621 (and there are such devices) will be just as capable as a router based on an MT7621. A switch based on an RTL8380 will obviously be less powerful, simply because it has fewer MIPS cores running at a lower speed. But it will probably be a better switch, with more full speed ports and more switch offloading features.

Buy a router if you need a router. If you need both a router and many switch ports, then consider pairing a realtek device with a more powerful device.

I run a combo of an RPI4 and a ZyXEL GS1900-10HP for example, getting both lots of PoE ports and SFP ports, and a semi-powerful router/server. With the PoE hat it feels almost as a single device.

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Thank you for the insightful reply. That makes a lot of sense. I might look into some combination of devices as you suggested!

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