Hey everyone, I’ve been a long-time reader of these forums and always appreciate the technical depth here. Lately, I’ve been hitting a bit of a bottleneck in my home lab setup. As I’ve been expanding my local environment to include more dedicated machines for CI/CD builds and various testing nodes, I’m finding that my initial networking setup is starting to buckle under the load.

One specific issue I’m dealing with is managing the sheer number of physical connections required. I have several micro-servers and development boards that need stable, wired connections, and I’m quickly running out of room on my primary router. I’ve been considering adding a small, unmanaged 7-port network switch to the mix, as it would give me just enough breathing room to keep everything hardwired without moving to a massive enterprise-grade rack switch. However, I’m concerned about potential performance trade-offs. Has anyone here found that these smaller, consumer-grade switches struggle with the traffic overhead when multiple machines are pulling dependencies or pushing large build artifacts simultaneously?

My personal experience has always been that Wi-Fi is too unpredictable for long-running builds, so I’m really committed to keeping this physical. I’m curious if any of you have had success with these smaller switch configurations, or if you’ve found that they introduce latency that starts to impact the speed of your local development workflows. Do you think it’s better to consolidate traffic through a single managed switch, or is a simpler, distributed approach usually sufficient for a home-based development environment? I’d love to hear how you all handle your local network density.