Gold SE upload speed and other questions

Hi folks

Just recently received a Gold SE for review, which I am going through now. It replaces a Synology rt6600ax, connected to a 1 Gbps up/down fibre service, using a PPPoE connection. After installing the Gold SE I had the connection changed to 2 Gbps up/down.

The first image shows a month of Speedtest Tracker runs. The test is to a public speedtest server inside my provider, from a box connected via 2.5 Gbps to the router.

I marked "A" as the moment the Gold SE replaced the Synology. Up until that moment, the previous router managed to consistently hit its 950 Mbps limit. The X spots are when the speedtest ran during heavy download (as in 200 simultaneous connections to a usenet server, downloading at 80% of max speed).

It is noticeable the erratic behaviour of upload speeds, after the Gold SE went in.

1. I have a suspicion this is CPU-bound and that the Gold SE might be struggling when trying to push during speedtests.

Another thing I noticed was how "slow" the first connection seemed to be, noticeable when navigating to a new website.

For this I tried testing with my Cloudflare Zero Trust DNS (same as configured on the old router), then changed to public Cloudflare, then ISP DNS. None of these impacted the "first connection" speed.

I did have some outbound geo-blocking rules, so I removed these, and the behaviour went away.

1. I suspect geo-blocking is quite a heavy task compared to simple list blocking because it will probably require more CPU to translate IP to location.

I also installed Beszel-agent as a container and attached is the last 24 hours showing how the CPU is used, even with no traffic.

Yes, I tested different situations and read the documentation about speed, WAN configuration, rules.

Any comments on those points? Would the SE be better for a 1 Gbps and should really go for the Plus on a 2 Gbps connection?

Appreciate your comments.