I have a firewalla purple. it’s idiot mode networking and I love it, but I have never been too thrilled with it’s cloud shit and really don’t to rely on it as my only option right now.
A while back I tried spinning up a VM with opnsense and never got good performance off my home ryzen server. I tried multiple NICs and even bare metal installs and while bare metal was a little more performant, it was never able to reach gigabit on WAN. the firewalla falls just a hair short of gigabit WAN but its still way ahead of my more muscular server. I notice the CPU load spikes high. it seems nothing I do can bring down that CPU load for opnsense. openwrt performed a bit better but still never hit gigabit speeds and was still below the firewalla’s performance. bare metal was again a bit better but still not matching the firewalla.
The firewalla is a heavily optimized amlogic based pi. it’s not special. but it works right and my crap doesnt. I have other SBCs I can use if folding into the home server as a VM just isnt practical but the server is always on anyway and already has extra resources I can throw into this so I’d like to just throw it all in there, snapshot a working config and be done with it if I can.
I walked away from this a while back thinking I would have a fix if I took a break and came back to it later but I’m still stumped. How are other people doing this?
I think you have enough people here stating their pfSense / OPNSense works fine, so I’d guess you have something unique with your setup - maybe it’s a dodgy cable, or you’re running both In & Out traffic over vlans on the same NIC on your PC and getting problems with unmanaged switches dealing with that…
I had an issue with my pfSense box not negotiating to 1Gb on a Cat6 cable to a switch. I tried all sorts of diagnostics and it turned out to be a problem with the wall socket crimping, so hardware issues do need to be checked… I’m obviously assuming you didn’t use the exact same cables as your firewalla…
Just some different angles to think about…