Pi 2 vs Marvell ARMv5 - Thoughts on performance

[technosf]

Hiya,

Currently I'm running NSA325 (1.6ghz v5 with 512M ram, single core) as an home router/server, and it works well. But I'm intrigued to know about how it compares with the Pi 2 B with its larger memory and multiple cores. Experience with original Pi B was that it was not much but a toy.

At the moment I'm running dnsmasq, hostapd, ufw and gpsd, squid, nginx and looking to add a VPN server.

One specific point of interest for me is that the Marvell has hardware AES where as the Pi does not afaik.

I would like to hear your experiences!

Cheers.

[moonman]

If in your setup network throughput doesn't matter than Pi2 will be better in terms of cpu performance. But it has the same NIC on the same USB shared bus as Pi1. As a NAS your NSA will perform much much better.

[technosf]

Nope - not using the NSA as a NAS. As a router the NSA is configured with two Ethernet ports - inbuilt is WAN side, and I have a USB-3 Gigabit LAN side.

On the PI, of course, it's USB2 only... Perhaps use two USB Gigabit devices for WAN/LAN and use the on-board 100-T for DMZ duties.

The issue I'm most concerned about is CPU, the ability to handle AES and SSL throughput, and can the USB-2's exploit gigabit USB Ethernet dongles and not become a bottleneck.

[moonman]

Rpi2 soc has a single usb2 port which is expanded into 5 using internal usb hub. Builtin nic is on the same usb bus. ALL usb devices share the same usb bus which is as you know 240Mbit/s full duplex. So it really does not matter if you use 2 gigabit usb adapters as usb is the bottleneck here. Connect an external usb hdd and you are down to crawl. I don't see ssl being an issue as kirkwood ssl engine is pretty slow. It does offload things off of the cpu, but is slower that ssl done in software on the same kirkwood. With 4 faster cores this will not be an issue.