If your like most home/office network tweakers looking for every bit of performance you can squeeze out of your home network. For $49 the small, yet powerful Ubiquiti ER-X is a great value offering gigabit ports, PoE, small form factor and VPN functionality.

As with any router the manufacturers release software updates periodically that offer fixes, security patches and added features. In once example, enabling hardware offloading on the Ubiquiti ER-X models.

Offloading is used to execute functions of the router using the hardware directly, rather than a process of software functions to greatly increase performance. The benefit of enabling offload in EdgeOS is increased performance and throughput by not limiting the performance to the CPU.

One example exhibiting the benefit of offload is a scenario with an ER-Lite and a 1GB ISP connection. When NAT occurs, by default, all traffic will be handled by the CPU and throughput may be limited to 300Mbps. After enabling IPv4 Forwarding which allows for the NAT process to be offloaded, throughput will then be about 950Mbps.

Note: In order to prevent firmware upgrades to change the EdgeOS configuration itself, all routers are shipped with offloading disabled. Therefore, it will need to be enabled manually to allow for best performance.

Offloading is not enabled by default because it was not an available feature in earlier firmware versions. Our firmware upgrades allow for new features, but do not change the configuration just by installing the upgrade.

Below are available commands to enable offloading and increase performance (For ER-X, ER‑X‑SFP, EP-R6 only):

configure<br /> set system offload hwnat enable<br /> set system offload ipsec enable<br /> commit<br /> save<br /> exit

Enjoy better performance on your ER-X !

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