Upgrade to 23.01 WAN speed halved

drewsaur

Are any of you using traffic shaping? I have a post in the traffic shaping forum about my speed being cut in half with traffic shaping. I turned it off and that solved my problem. Unfortunately, due to another (known) bug, I can’t turn it back on to do more experimentation.

brachy33

@drewsaur

Thanks for sharing. Unless traffic shaping is enabled by default on a fresh install (which I would assume No) then I am currently not.

drewsaur

@brachy33 Correct. It is not.

debo4479

Can also confirm I am experiencing the same issue. I am running pfsense as VM on unRaid and passing through Ethernet controller: Chelsio Communications Inc T520-CR. I get half of my fios 1gb speed on Wan. Rolled back to 22.05 for now.

guygg

@stephenw10 Not the best expert at what it should be reporting, but here are the interface lines from the boot log:

ix0: <Intel(R) X550-T2> mem 0xd1000000-0xd11fffff,0xd1400000-0xd1403fff at device 0.0 on pci1
ix0: Using 2048 TX descriptors and 2048 RX descriptors
ix0: Using 4 RX queues 4 TX queues
ix0: Using MSI-X interrupts with 5 vectors
ix0: allocated for 4 queues
ix0: allocated for 4 rx queues
ix0: Ethernet address: ********************
ix0: PCI Express Bus: Speed 8.0GT/s Width x4
ix0: eTrack 0x80000492 PHY FW V523
ix0: netmap queues/slots: TX 4/2048, RX 4/2048
ix1: <Intel(R) X550-T2> mem 0xd1200000-0xd13fffff,0xd1404000-0xd1407fff at device 0.1 on pci1
ix1: Using 2048 TX descriptors and 2048 RX descriptors
ix1: Using 4 RX queues 4 TX queues
ix1: Using MSI-X interrupts with 5 vectors
ix1: allocated for 4 queues
ix1: allocated for 4 rx queues
ix1: Ethernet address: ******************
ix1: PCI Express Bus: Speed 8.0GT/s Width x4
ix1: eTrack 0x80000492 PHY FW V523
ix1: netmap queues/slots: TX 4/2048, RX 4/2048

stephenw10

That's fine, 4 Tx/Rx queues on each. More than enough to handle 5Gbps unless your CPU is extremely low power.
What CPU is it? Does it report the expected clock speed?

guygg

@stephenw10 It's an i5-6500 with 8gb RAM running on a 256 NVMe. Under full load, the CPU doesn't break a sweat. Interrupts on the interfaces in the status screen continue to pile up. Any other things to check/tweak? May roll back to v22 soon so that I can get proper network performance back.

https://imgur.com/a/6hBSAn1

Thanks

stephenw10

If the CPU speed reported correctly by: sysctl dev.cpu | grep freq ?

I've seen one report of another 6th gen CPU stuck at 800MHz.

Seeing interrupts on the interfaces like that is expected. If it's moving a lot of traffic that rate isn't that high either. It would be interesting to see how that value compares in 22.05 but I suspect it will be similar.

Steve

guygg

@stephenw10 Hmmm, CPU freq seems OK to me:

dev.cpu.3.freq_levels: 3200/-1
dev.cpu.3.freq: 1152
dev.cpu.2.freq_levels: 3200/-1
dev.cpu.2.freq: 1194
dev.cpu.1.freq_levels: 3200/-1
dev.cpu.1.freq: 1149
dev.cpu.0.freq_levels: 3200/-1
dev.cpu.0.freq: 1190

And I wasn't aware of what those interrupt value should look like. Not something I ever really paid attention to when things were working well. :)

stephenw10

Yup looks like what I expect with speed shift support, which is new in 23.01.

brachy33

Quick update. Installed a new X550-T2 card and flashed to latest firmware, installed and configured from scratch 2.60 CE-->22.05 with security patches-->23.01. WAN is connected to same Metronet GPON Nokia ONT and...full WAN performance is back. 950Mbps/950Mbps symmetrical.

Of course now...I'm seeing small errors IN forming on the WAN interface (I had this happening before with this NIC as WAN interface) but it's working at correct speeds. The errors IN on this card is why I went to the Chelsio T520-BT in the first place, and that card plays nice with my ONT, but the speeds were halved on 23.01 when I first upgraded.

Next step is to double check firmware on the Chelsio card, update Lenovo server BIOS to latest, then go through entire install process again and see if I can get the speeds on the Chelsio card to remain full-speed on 23.01.

UPDATE: With the system using the x550-T2 for WAN on 23.01... after a restart no more errors IN on WAN from GPON ONT! Almost 1TB of data transferred since that reboot and no errors on either WAN or LAN. Beauty!! Looks like 23.01 is gravvy.

debo4479

Update on my side. I had a spare Intel nic i211 that I passed through to use for my WAN.

Did a fresh install, dropped my config on it and brought it up to 22.05. I was getting full gigabit speeds download/upload.

Upgraded to 23.01 and again WAN download speeds are cut in half. I am seeing half WAN downloads speed on both Chelsio and Intel NIC. The Intel nic is at least giving me full upload speed. Could it be something in my config? I don't have anything exotic. And it works as expected on 22.05.

stephenw10

Do you have any sort of traffic shaping in play? That's about the only thing that might affect it like that.

debo4479

@stephenw10 no traffic shaping configured.

brachy33

@debo4479

Just a thought here and no idea if this is valid. But when I did my reinstall from 2.6-->23.01 I did not use a config backup. I manually reconfigured all my settings vs using the backup config...just to test (also my network config is pretty simple).

Could there be something in your old configuration backup that's just not carrying over to 23.01 and causing issues?

debo4479

I have a backup pfsense VM that I have on a spare poweredge server. It has the same config as my main server. I updated that to 23.01 and I get full 1gb upload/download. Only difference with main server is cpu and Broadcom nics.

My next step is to setup a new vanilla pfsense install on my main server to test my Chelsio/i211 nics.

kanser-russ

I am also experiencing this issue on all interfaces of my Chelsio T422 after the upgrade to 23.01 iperf from pfSense to my Unraid boxes is capped around 460-480mbps same with testing from one Unraid box to another through different interfaces. Doesn't seem to matter if its a SFP+ or Gig copper port, I can't get over 480mbps.

I will probably have to roll back to 22.05 until this is addressed. Not sure the best way to do so as I didn't notice the issue until after I made some changes to my configuration while on 23.01

superbree

same problem here. Chelsio 10Gbp card can only get about 460 Mps through 23.1.

I've wasted the better part of a day getting back to 22.05

Any update on this netgate"??

SteveITS

@superbree I don't have a Chelsio card but did a bit of searching and found

https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/hardware/tune.html#chelsio-cxgbe-4-cards

which has I think the same settings as

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/intel-vs-chelsio-network-card-performance.70202/

...did you try those? (and restart)

kanser_russ

@steveits I have had those settings enabled for quite some time on my rig, I checked that they carried over to 23.01 and they did. Doesn’t seem to matter.

I ended up rolling back to 22.05 via a boot environment after saving my config from 23.01 then I changed the repo version over to 22.05 and imported only the sections of the new config I had changes in (dhcp, rules, aliases).

Seems stable for now, I hope they fix this Chelsio issue and the Unbound issue I was having on 23.01 where it would drop dns upon first visit to a web page then 5 seconds later it would pull dns and display the page.