If you check the forums, Apple Engineers say that background tasks typically only run overnight https://forums.developer.apple.com/forums/thread/654424
People syncing their photos to the cloud expect them to sync pretty much instantly if the battery isn't low (which iCloud will do)
Yeah my friend left his MacBook Pro at airport security and when he was reunited 3 weeks later it still had like 50% charge with him tracking it using Find My the whole time
I can only look at Mikrotik gear in jealousy since they don't have a reseller here, so all that's available are overpriced, un-warrantied gray imports...
Very interesting, thanks for the links
The low power consumption is one of the reasons I was attracted to the ThinkCenter M720q devices. It definitely wouldn't be worth it if I had to build some tower PC or run a Xeon server!
The ISP router I'm getting is 10 Gbit (on WAN and one LAN port, the rest are 1 Gbit), but the configuration seems limited and it's a $5/mo rental tacked onto the bill.
I think I can live without IDS/IPS, in all the time I used it on UniFi, it never gave me any actionable info, so hopefully that helps me with performance.
That's interesting about the 10Gbit ethernet cards. Is that with something like a Mellanox or some other card? My NAS is going to be stuck on 2.5 Gbit since it's just a Synology.
Thanks for the Intel x520 recommendation, those are looking like a much better deal right now than the Mellanox cards I was looking at.
Glad to hear it about the BSD networking!
I'm still trying to avoid the Xeons for power consumption reasons, hehe, although it would be a lot more fun for sure!
Yeah I'm not ordering anything until I have the connection up and running, which is why I opted to rent the ISP router to begin with, but looking at results online that others on the same ISP have posted, I can probably expect up to around 7 Gbit real-world so I've been thinking that I will at least want something better than the standard 1 Gbit or even 2.5 Gbit stuff out there, hence why I'm trying to research what the hardware requirements actually are!
These ThinkCenter M720q machines I'm looking at all seem to have a single PCIe 3.0 8x card slot, regardless of the CPU, and that seems to be all that the Mellanox ConnectX cards need according to their spec sheets, so hopefully that is good.
We also need to consider the practical aspects. Who mucks after the horses? Who feeds them? Do we need a stall? Does it need to be air conditioned in the summer/winter?
Here are some results if anyone comes across this thread in the future.
The baseline result I need to achieve is a speedtest result of 7.5 Gbit that the ISP’s rental router gives me.
I ended up picking up:
Initially I installed pfSense. I ran iperf3 to just get an initial sanity check that the PCIe card/wiring was working right but was getting results between 3-7 Gbit with the CPU pegging at 50%. Some quick googling returned results like “you can’t run iperf on pfSense!” and “pfSense isn’t a router, why do people keep using it as a router, it’s a firewall!”, so I decided to switch to OpenWRT since the Linux side of things always seems to make more sense.
On OpenWRT, iperf easily hit 9 Gbit with like the CPU at 95% idle.
It took like 2 hours to configure the weird IPIP6 tunnel my ISP uses for IPv4, but once it was set up, the machine has no trouble routing the same 7.5 Gbit speedtest the ISP router managed, with the CPU usage at 78% idle (the remainder in “sirq”)