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Comment by distantsounds | Hacker News Reader

And then you hit CPU bottlenecks whenever you do literally anything bandwidth intensive. The limits of using hobbyist hardware, you get hobbyist level performance. A Raspberry Pi is a horrible solution for running Wireguard. You can get a tiny 1L PC running on an actual Intel or AMD processor with far more perf/$.

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I'm not sure what's the max throughput is, but I just tested 50 Mbit down/80 Mbit up passthrough from a cafe Wi-Fi to my 3B with Wireguard (using wg-quick) at home. Seems enough for anything I'd use it for.

My home Internet upload speed is 35 Mbps. A Pi 1 can handle that speed, much less a Pi 3 or 4 :)

But the nice thing is PiVPN works great on any little PC. Or even a VM.

That was just my anecdotal point that a Pi can handle typical home internet speeds over Wireguard without overtaxing the CPU. IMHO, Wireguard's setup is pretty trivial as is, especially moving to it after years (decades at this point) of various OpenVPN setups that require much more tinkering. So no need for external tools. But I'm glad they exist for those who find them useful. Either way, keep up the good work with your knowledge sharing, I'm a big fan of what you do.

Heck, that's more than what most people I know get at home

There are some cool HP thin clients available on eBay for a fraction of the scarce Pi these days, one of them even has an nVme slot so you can put in a real SSD. If I was doing this today I’d use one of those.

Presently my “home server” is only used for home assistant, and it runs on a 2011 MacBook Pro with a bad keyboard, running Debian. It actually runs so well on Linux that the fan doesn’t even spin, at least not audibly.

Jeff does explicitly call this out in his video, but as sibling commenters say, it's really a matter of whether that's enough for you. Even 20 Mbit symmetrical would be more than enough for me to run a stream from a Plex server while serving other web or SSH traffic easy enough. What you do say though brings up a great point though - if you ran this on a Pi and you're not getting the performance you need for your use case, check CPU utilization on the Pi, and consider running your VPN on a device with more oomph.

Wireguard doesn't use any aes cpu functions so it actually is highly performant on low end chips vs. OpenVPN. True, you're still limited by port speed and such but it's fine for most people. If you need more then you're not going to be running it on a pi (or old laptop etc) anyway.

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