Yow! I've been running #Minisforum MS-A2 #VyOS router performance benchmarks in the background for most of the weekend. I'll make a relatively small config, reboot, re-run the multi-hour NDR sweep with trex, lather, rinse, repeat.
When I set the BIOS to "performance" power mode instead of "balanced" (the default), I notice that it spikes to drawing 185W from the wall and runs like a bat out of hell for 6 seconds before throttling itself back down to 155W.
That's a spicy little mini PC -- I don't know how it expects to cool 185W. I mean, obviously it isn't, but it seems like a weirdly aggressive thing to even attempt.
This is *obviously* optimized for gaming/desktop uses, where a 6s spike in performance followed by slowing back down is a good thing. It benchmarks fairly poorly this way, though. Dropping back to "balanced" seems to give much better numbers overall.
I tried turning on AMD PBO, which will boost clock speeds even more when thermals permit it.
Thermals didn't permit it.
I'm running each test 3x, and with PBO I was seeing giant differences from run to run. Like 5.84/14.83/5.85 Mpps across 3 runs. In "balanced" mode without PBO it consistently got >15 Mpps, so enabling PBO isn't even slightly helpful.
This box feels like it should be faster than it is on routing; it's clearly faster than my previously-measured numbers on this thing's Intel twin, but throughput doesn't seem to be linear with CPU load. At 80% of peak load, it's using something like 50% of its CPU, but increasing past that rapidly swamps the CPU.
I saw similar with the Intel system, but I blamed it on Alder Lake's mix of P and E cores. The AMD model has 16 equal cores, so *that*'s not the problem.
I'm not sure if I'm hitting kernel-tunable issues (I've found at least one so far), hardware-tunable issues (Mellanox *loves* knobs), cache-size issues, or memory-bandwidth issues.
I probably have the tools to figure it out, though, so I'll leave tests running in the background for a day or two and keep making little tweaks to see what helps.
