Homelab troubleshooting traces 10GbE slowdown to Intel E610 driver's default receive buffers
A homelab operator upgrading to a UniFi UNAS Pro 8, an Intel E610-XT2 10GbE card, and a Minisforum MS-01 miniPC found file transfers crawling at 100-200 Mbps despite all hardware reporting a full 10 gigabit link. After ruling out the NAS, its RAID array, SSD caching, Immich, SMB signing, and Windows Defender, an iperf3 test isolated the problem to networking between the desktop and the MS-01, revealing nearly a million discarded received packets on the Intel adapter. The root cause turned out to be the E610 driver defaulting to 512 receive buffers instead of its supported maximum of 4096.