I've always assumed that the gigabit in GbE meant 1000Mbps.

But wireguard.com/performance/ shows numbers higher than that, and blog.ipfire.org/post/why-not-w, which criticizes the methodology of the first link, also seems to assume 1024Mbps?

@casualwp

1 Gb is 125 Megabytes or 1000 Megabits
1 GB is 1000 Megabytes or 8000 Megabits

GB means "Gigabyte" and Gb means "Gigabit" different things,

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@freemo

I guess my question is more about gigabit versus gibibit, if that makes any sense.

@freemo

Yeah, but since the G in GbE stands for gigabit, I've always assumed it to be 1000Mb/s. So I have no idea where the >1000 numbers in the links come from :/

@casualwp Im confused WireGuard is a VPN not a GbE card... so why would you be suprised it can go above 1 GbE?

@freemo

The testing configuration seems to indicate that gigabit ethernet cards are used?

@casualwp Ok I think I know whats going on here. I did some quick checking im not sure but maybe WireGuard VPN compresses the data before it goes through the line. So the throughput can be slightly higher than the physical line can support.

@freemo

AFAIK there is no compression by WG, and the main dev has been really against it, e.g., lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wire .

(Also, iperf3 traffic should be very low-entropy and thus *extremely* compressible :P )

@casualwp @freemo it's due to the base 2, it used to be 1GB = 1024 MB for a long time. Now we reuse the 1000 multiplier so that 1GB = 1000MB but sometimes the notation "GiB"/"MiB"/"KiB" is used to distinguish it from the other one.
Of course, the same is available with the bits.

@NicolasConstant

No 1 GbE is theoretical maximum of 1000 Mb not 1024..

1024 is used in some contexts incorrectly, but this isnt one of them.

@casualwp

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