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    Seemingly reduced upload speeds when routing via pfSense

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Routing and Multi WAN
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    • D
      DeanKellham
      last edited by DeanKellham

      Hi all,

      I'm a bit new to using pfSense so suspect I may have done something wrong, but then everything else appears to work as I expected, so this one is stumping me a bit.

      I have pfSense running in a VM on Proxmox. In this test environment I'm using my Proxmox machine's only Gb NIC bridged to the VM three times - one untagged (for my main network), then other tagged VLAN 10 and 30 for my test networks.

      I'm blocking traffic between the VLANs with the exception of allowing 10 and 30 to route to my VDSL modem router which is untagged on VLAN 1. This seems to work fine, and all networks can get out to the internet as I expected.

      The issue is however that when I use the pfSense box as my gateway on VLAN 1 my upload speed to the internet is reduced to <1% of what it otherwise is. By switching my PC between using pfSense as a gateway and my hardware modem router I can recreate the issue reliably. Download speeds don't appear to be affected. Additionally speeds between local hosts on the same VLAN (using iperf) seem unaffected. This leads me to believe that I've misconfigured pfSense somewhere.

      I have an "allow all" firewall rule on VLAN 1 (placed below the block rule for the other VLANs) so no traffic should be being filtered from what I can see..

      Does anyone have any idea as to why this may be happening?

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      • D
        DeanKellham
        last edited by

        Been doing a little more testing and it seems that the the issue doesn't affect PCs on VLANs 10 or 30.

        Could it have something to do with VLAN 1 being the same VLAN as the modem router? So I'm technically routing through pfSense, only to route back to the same network, then out to the internet?

        I did think it could have something to do with the default behaviour being different within pfSense if it detects the interface as a WAN network (as it has a gateway), but if this were the case I'd see the same issue when routing from VLAN 10 or 30 also.

        I'm honestly just a bit lost. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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