this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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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?

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[–] irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Wow, I run opnsense in proxmox along with a pihole and a couple of other small services and never hit 100% CPU on an Intel N100. My miniPC box has 4 2.5 gigabit network ports though I only use 2 of them, one for LAN and one to the modem. I do also have a managed switch, though, that has a couple of 10 gigabit ports a couple of 2.5 and the rest 1. Likely the switch is taking some of load off of the router I suppose. Might try getting a low-end managed switch. If you're in the US do it quick, though as a lot of networking equipment is about to spike in price since the administration banned all new foreign made equipment and none is made I'm he US.

[–] muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

I have a smart switch. It has some managed features like VLANs and stuff like that but it’s not a full managed switch

[–] irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

If configured properly, it can usually bypass the router altogether. In my setup I have several VLANs for different traffic, so for me it's important to have a Layer 3 switch that can handle the routing between VLANS. But if you don't use VLANs, a layer 2 switch will build a mac address table and bypass the router once it knows where the traffic is going. That way only your DNS queries and similar get sent to the router for internal traffic on the LAN. Then the issue is just traffic going to the internet.

For the internet side you just need to configure the firewall to drop packets on ports (not reject, just drop/ignore) you don't use and use something like fail2ban or crowdsec to make your router outright drop malicious and LLM bot kinds of traffic to ports you do use that otherwise have to be processed. That generally will reduce processing load unless you have self-hosted services that really generate a ton of traffic in which case you can move those to VPSs outside of your network.

Those are my general strategies at a very high level.

[–] muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 days ago

I do use VLANs. But in testing even without them going laptop->server->WAN and nothing else it could not do it.