Cisco 892 router performance test

[Juri Jestin]

Hello,

Test was carried out for clarify the performance characteristics of the Cisco 892 router with different configurations during transmission of packets with different length.

Some background information is present in document also for better
understanding.

You can see the attached file if you are interested.

--

Juri

[rbuyo]

Really interesting and complete performance test.

Can you post the exact model of C892 the tests are based on ?

Thanks you

[Juri Jestin]

Hi,

it was under test:

Cisco 892/K9

IOS Software Universal/K9, Version 15.1(2)T3

license feature advipservices

VPN module onboard.

[Marko Pribanic]

Juri,

Thank you for shearing, great doc!

[Joel Girard]

I'm interested in seeing this same set of tests done on a 892FSR which is Gig WAN/LAN.

Would like to see how far you can push that WAN Gig connection.

Great tests.

[casanavep]

I am really surprised that the "Gigabit Ethernet security router" has nearly no VPN throughput capability when running AES.  I would love to see the new 800M put under the same testing. 

[mario.jost]

I just did some testing as we have a Gigabit fibre WAN link and could not utilize the whole bandwidth with the C892FSP-K9 (license advipservices)

We could get around 90Mbit/s FlexVPN performance, but only around 50Mbit/s for LAN clients with normal surfing. We had ip route-cache disabled on the WAN (dialer) interface. So this was the first thing to optimize. We had a zone based firewall implementation for allowing the return traffic for surfing clients. I switched that to CBAC (old fashioned ip inspect). This did give some more performance. Lastly, i configured a static 1:1 NAT to bypass any inspection. Here are my results:

#       Config on Dialer1            Download      Upload
ZBF     no ip route-cache            55Mbit/s    85Mbit/s
ZBF     ip route-cache cef          180Mbit/s   173Mbit/s
CBAC    no ip route-cache            65Mbit/s   123Mbit/s
CBAC    ip route-cache cef          206Mbit/s   196Mbit/s
NAT     no ip route-cache            75Mbit/s   285Mbit/s
NAT     ip route-cache cef          305Mbit/s   355Mbit/s

The speeds are very consistent throughout multiple tests. Although the NAT is the fastest, it isn't an option for most environments. We switched from 887 routers to 892 as they support Gigabit. But apparently the only have the Gigabit interfaces and not the CPU for it. I am very sad that a $500 router from Cisco cant handle a gigabit WAN connection and a $100 Asus router can. Cisco wants us to buy ISR 4000 series boxes for those kind of connections. There are areas in the world where Gigabit fiber internet connections are very common nowadays. Cisco should adapt to this.