After running the WireGuard benchmarks on a Pi Zero, I thought I’d get out my Raspberry Pi 3A+ and try it out just for fun. These were performed with this USB-to-ethernet adapter from UGreen

As with the other test, my client was a VM running Debian with 2 CPU cores and 2GB of RAM as to not be a bottleneck in this test.

My Raspberry Pi 3A+ is running Raspbian Lite (April 2019 version) rather than something like DietPi or Armbian.

The tests 🔗

To start, here is a baseline of running iperf from my Debian VM to the Pi Zero without WireGuard:

This speed is pretty much wire speed for a 100mb USB NIC.

I’ll now turn on WireGuard and try iperf again:

It looks like the results are still near wire speed, and the CPU utilization is fairly even across all four CPU cores when running WireGuard.

I’ll now run the same speedtest-cli tests that I did in the Pi Zero benchmark, testing first from the Pi to the internet:

Again, near wire speed in this test.

Now I’ll paste the Asciicast from the other test, just because I don’t feel a need to replicate the test 🙃:

And now a few tests from the Debian VM running over WireGuard (while setting all IPv4 traffic to flow over WireGuard):

Closing 🔗

As you can see, the speeds vary from 46 to 80 mbps download, and 20 to 60 mbps upload. Either way, this Pi is definitely more capable than the Pi Zero to handle WireGuard traffic. With the extra headroom, you could even run other services such as an Nginx reverse proxy or other similar services if you decide to run this at the DMZ edge of your home network, or as a simple server in any other type of network.

Related posts:

• WireGuard performance with a Pi Zero  (4 minute read)
• Scripting LanCache DNS updates with Pi-hole  (9 minute read)
• Quick BASH function for adding WireGuard peers  (1 minute read)