Not by much but you have to take into consideration that caching also taxes the CPU as my Athlon 5350 goes to 90% CPU usage when caching lots of data, I.E download games on Steam and since squid caching doesn't work on Steam my CPU was doing work that I'd see no benefit from. Your mileage may vary but given my usage I didn't see any benefits from it. Its worth throwing in an HDD and testing squid with your setup but be aware that it has limitations.
Not sure there is a Netgear SG-100, do you mean the Netgate SG-1000?
@noenken I just looked up the APU.1D4 Allegedly it is fully compatible with pfSense. And it has WiFi, RAM, PSU etc built in. So I'd only have to add an HDD to it and be fine. And WiFi would work out of the box, right? But the performance is probably pretty bad, huh? Are 200mbits Internet speed even feasible?
@villian Sorry, I don't speak Chinese. What is that box thingy called, so I can look it up in English?
For caching something specific like linux packages you're better off using something that's made to do that, like apt-cacher for debian based distros. While it's probably possible to configure squid to do that it's not really made for it (storing and serving large files long term), it's made for web content which has small files and updates frequently.
Just a quick warning, some of the wireless cards I tested were Atheros and based on the AR9380 chipset and I couldn't get it to work correctly but hopefully you'll have better luck than I did.
My APU.1D4 kit was ordered without a wifi card, you would have to add one. It has some storage in it for the OS but for caching you would have to add something. 1GHz dual core was enough for 50Mbit but I wasn't using a ton of packages. I have a 100Mbit connection now but I switched to my new router before that. So I can not say for sure if it would or wouldn't work. My guess is it would work for routing and blocking but probably not for more complex workloads. I don't think it would hold up for a 200Mbit connection at all.
Low throughput and had trouble connecting clients, I suspect it had something to do with the signal even though I was right next to it. I may have had a duff card, I do have another one of the same model I could test but after getting the Unifi AP I didn't see much point. The next time my router is offline I may install the card for the lulz to see if it works any better than the first one.
Be sure to check "Preserve common wireless configuration through interface deletions and reassignments." in the interface settings, that might fix the thruput if lucky, I know mine did :)
I'll check that out when I test it, its been online for 118 days and I don't want to take it offline unless I have to and since my Unifi AP is better than the card it isn't worth taking it offline. Would be good if it did work though, it might make a good failsafe if I have problems with the Unifi AP or if I need to change settings for the AP from a wireless client as it reboots whenever I change the settings.
I found another very interesting case. It looks kinda nice, is way cheaper than the one I considered before and it comes with a 400W internal PSU:
The downsides I see are: The case is a tiny bit larger. (But therefore I don't need the external power brick.) And the PSU has a fan. Do you think I could just get rid of the PSU fan? After all I only need like up to 30W anyway.
