Well that is only 50% combined, a lot of folks would call that quite a difference.
It really depends on what you want to use. If you intend to use traffic shaping/QoS at around 1Gbps, really the r7800 will not make you happy.
What are you talking about?
$ iperf3 -c 192.168.1.1
Connecting to host 192.168.1.1, port 5201
[ 5] local 192.168.1.100 port 51547 connected to 192.168.1.1 port 5201
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate
[ 5] 0.00-1.00 sec 93.2 MBytes 781 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 1.00-2.00 sec 102 MBytes 856 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 2.00-3.00 sec 101 MBytes 847 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 3.00-4.00 sec 102 MBytes 856 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 4.00-5.00 sec 101 MBytes 845 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 5.00-6.00 sec 102 MBytes 854 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 6.00-7.00 sec 101 MBytes 846 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 7.00-8.00 sec 103 MBytes 865 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 8.00-9.00 sec 100 MBytes 842 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 9.00-10.00 sec 103 MBytes 865 Mbits/sec
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate
[ 5] 0.00-10.00 sec 1008 MBytes 845 Mbits/sec sender
[ 5] 0.00-10.00 sec 1008 MBytes 845 Mbits/sec receiver
This is over 802.11ac connection from my iMac to the router. Why announce personal experience as a common fact that is not true?
Andrejs
So this does not actually test the firewall/NAT masquerading performance?
As moeller0 suggests, LAN-to-WLAN traffic is completely different from WAN-to-LAN with routing, NAT and often PPPoE at work; the later is what I was referring to.
The ipq8065 SOC has two 800 MHz little-endian ubicom32 derived NSS/ NPU cores meant for offloading these parts of networking (up to high level protocols, like IPsec) from the two main 1.7 GHz ARMv7/ KRAIT300 cores. The OEM firmware can leverage these to achieve full performance, OpenWrt currently can't - all routing, NAT, PPPoE needs to go through the ARMv7 cores.
While I personally can't test or vouch beyond 100 MBit/s WAN throughput (because my nbg6817 is in use - and because setting up a virtual PPPd to benchmark against (PPP adds considerably more load on the CPU, testing plain ethernet throughput wouldn't be representative) would involve quite some more efforts), those who do use these devices with faster lines put the limit around the 350-400 MBit/s mark - with some reporting success up to 600 MBit/s; enabling flow-offloading might push this further (and the potential for hardware flow-offloading to the NSS cores might push it all the way one day, but we aren't there yet - and there are no guarantees that this will ever be possible) - SQM will lower it a bit.
IPQ8065 based routers (e.g. Netgear r7800 or ZyXEL nbg6817) are very decent, pretty reliable and providing good wlan stability and performance in my personally experiences and they are fast enough to accommodate many services besides plain routing (e.g. VPN), up to a WAN-to-LAN throughput of 350-400 MBit/s. If your needs go significantly beyond that, and especially for 1 GBit/s line speed, you need to look elsewhere at the moment - for such a line I personally would look at x86_64 first (as these might mean you may want to use VPN connections or other advanced service around those speeds as well), but mvebu based devices can cover this as well. With 1 GBit/s and higher WAN connections coming around, just as well as the needs for beyond 802.11ac wlan standards, there will arrive new SOC generations providing more steam - but those are still to come, while x86 or mvebu exist right now.
Please see below:
This is over a 100mbit connection with SQM piece_of_cake and download/upload speed at 90000/90000. So yes, this does test firewall/NAT performance as well.
Oops, sorry I just realised 350-400 Mbit/s WAN to LAN speed is what you were talking about. Indeed, that might be the case, but my provider is offering just 100 Mbit/s, so r7800 performance is absolutely decent in this regard.
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Thank you for the detailed answer, so it seems the ideal solution (if I don't want to build my own x86 router) is Linksys WRT1900ACS and the price is very similar to the Netgear, so I think this is mabye an ideal solution,
Unless... if I decide to build my router. Any topic/suggestion for these x86 based boxes? What I really looking for is a quiet, small and low power consumpiton device can replace my C7 at an affordable price. Is there any tested examples for this?
I guess there is also the turris Omnia, that might do the trick, even though turris OS has still not caught up to current openwrt stable, let alone master. It is a nice device though, and the developers are actively trying to track openwrt (stable) more timely.
Or even better, I found this on Amazon 
I think it is very good price if it can serve my giga-net after fiber upgrade, and definitely can handle my current one where the guaranteed is 300/200 and sometimes goes up to 700/500
That should be fine unless you're deadset on using SQM
I have
2 * WR1200JS price 25 euros fine
2 * Xiao mi Routeur 3g 36 euros but bad USB3 difficulty for install
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So, after extensive reading, I think my shortlist is this
Price-wise it is similar, so only questions remians are this
-- which one is more supported by OpenWRT (I suppose Linksys)?
-- Which one gives better WiFi stability / speed (I suppose Netgear)?
Any other thoughts?
And I agree, it would be the most logical decision would be the $35 Alliexpress one But I fear it is from the RQM (Random Quality Manufactoring) series
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The Marvell platform is more mature and is in mainline while the IPQ isn't (still true for 4.19 afaik). It's probably a dead race in the end as it will depend on your clients and environment regarding wifi. The IPQ platform is slightly faster than the Marvell but it's negligible in the end, not sure how well USB3 and eSATA works on IPQ but it's very stable and reliable on Marvell. IPQ does seem to have some quirkness with ethernet currenty but that will probably sort itself out in the end. Also, the Zyxel Z2 gives you a better bang for the buck than X4S in the end if you can live without eSATA. Its also currently cheaper at least on Amazon.de
I recommend Netgear R7800 as well, I have no issues with this device and 1GB ethernet ports are a minimum these days. I almost bought a router with 100mbit ports, I'm lucky I noticed that.
EDIT: However I read that people had problems maxing the WAN port if they have 1GB internet speeds, I can't verify this tho' as I don't have that internet connection speed myself,
I think it's really rare case these days when people have such speeds at their homes. For home use r7800 excels at what it does IMHO. Or maybe I live under the rock
I've got a 350/350 fibre connection at home, my C2600 (ipq8064) have no problems maxing it. The ipq8065 in the R7800 is faster I'm sure it can do 500+ with flow offloading. SQM is a different story, but who needs it with speeds like that
Apparently your ISP is better than Comcast, where SQM is a definite benefit even with DOCSIS 3.1. Without queue management at the router the latency goes into tenths of seconds.
Do you get full speeds over wifi too? and what sort of CPU load do you see when your connection is maxed?
They can potentially handle higher speeds: IPQ806x NSS Drivers
Not everyone will be happy with using a closed "core" for acceleration, but if one wants to squeeze every bit of performance and still have the main CPU at 1% load, those NSS cores can potentially put IPQ targets in a new league.
https://people.netfilter.org/pablo/netdev0.1/slides/IPQ806x-Hardware-acceleration_v2.pdf
Haven't done any wireless testing as it's not so important to me. As for CPU load have a look: https://imgur.com/a/Z3Bh7iA
Around 40MB/s there's 40-50% load on both cores. I'm using my own build compiled from master recently, flow offloading is on.
Yup. Hopefully DSA switch comes soon and you get another offloading boost just in time for your next speed bump.
I have a C2600 but its retired, I use an mt7621 router now which felt like a downgrade, but it seems mt76 is where most OSS wifi efforts are going.