What would be the minimum CPU performance level that would be recommended to run IPFire and be able to saturate a Gigabit WAN connection over PPPoE with the Intrusion Prevention System & an OpenVPN server running?
The reason I ask is that I have a Gigabit connection from my ISP that uses PPPoE and I find that the max speed I can get with the IPFire Mini Appliance with its AMD GX-412TC is ~300Mbps without the IPS running, and about ~130Mbps with IPS running. I wasn’t aware that PPPoE is entirely single threaded and is the resource hog it is. I gather the CPU just isn’t capable of doing a gigabit via PPPoE regardless of what else is running or not.
The other box I was running IPFire on was powered by an AMD Athlon 200GE (with an Intel i350 4-port NIC PCIe card) which had no trouble saturating the Gigabit link with the IPS running. However, this CPU has orders of magnitude higher performance than the embedded GX-412, but then again it does have the much newer AMD Zen cores and is a 35W part rather than a 6W one.
How low could you safely go on the CPU for my kind of scenario with IPFire?