Upgrade to 23.01 WAN speed halved
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@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: 1190And 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. :)
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Yup looks like what I expect with speed shift support, which is new in 23.01.
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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.
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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.
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Do you have any sort of traffic shaping in play? That's about the only thing that might affect it like that.
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@stephenw10 no traffic shaping configured.
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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?
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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.
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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
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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"??
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@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)
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@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.
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@steveits Yes. I've been running stable on 22.05 with an average of about 3.5 Gbps throughput before 23.01.
Before rolling back to 22.05, i did verify that the Chelsio fine tuning settings where correct and retained. It just won't go past 480 ~500 Mbps with a Chelsio Card on 23.01.
2.6 works fine. "update to 22.05, still functions as expected. Apply 23.01. Stuck at 500 Mbps.
Our network monitoring system indicated that the LAN port on the Chelsio card had over a million transmit discards on the LAN port while on 23.01
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I also have had the exact symptoms. Running Intel I210 adapter for the WAN interface and a Chelsio T520-CR for the LAN 10gb backend. Was fine on 22.05 running ~940 down and up. After the upgrade to 23.01 I was getting ~470 download and ~940 upload. I do have an internal speedtest server and did a test from a computer (10gb nic) -> vlan hop through pfsense -> speedtest server (10gb nic) I was able to do 9GB up and down fine. But when I was doing a download from my file server on a separate computer (10gb server -> vlan hop through pfsenes -> 1gb nic computer this time) and was getting the 470Mbps speeds internally. That conversion from 10gb to 1gb on the Chelsio card doesn't seem to be working correctly. I re-installed 2.6 from scratch, pulled the backup (up to 940mbps again up and down), 22.01, then finally to 23.01. As soon as I hit 23.01 it again dropped to 470 down, 940 up. I did test by putting the WAN interface on the Chelsio card with the same behaviors (I didn't test upload speed at this point because it was getting late.) I kept all the same settings and I was also using the tuning options suggested by Pfsense for the Chelsio cards and those were retained across the upgrades. I did get a message about a kernel panic the second time I upgraded to 23.01 and tried to download the debug log which failed at the time and couldn't find the log before I had to re-image again to get it working late that night. I'll see if I can reproduce the panic this weekend so that I can get it posted.
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So. I did install fresh (2.6) upgraded to 22.01, then 22.05 (pulled the config back during the process). Full gig speeds at this point. Upgraded to 23.01 and speeds was 470 down, 940 up again. Looked at making sure the card was on the latest firmware (1.27.0.0) which it was. Did a factory reset from the GUI to wipe any configurations that I had and take the config to stock to see if there was anything that I had configured that was causing the issue. Had to jump on the box for a minute to change the LAN port to the Chelsio card (WAN was still on Intel copper port) after the reset and once again did a speed test. 470 down, 940 up. I did see some interesting options on the ifconfig for the chelsio interface that I hadn't seen before. I turned off TXRTLMT and HWRXTSTMP with no change. I also tried to disable NOMAP but there was unable to disable it through ifconfig. This appears to be a driver issue and I have not been able to make a single change in the configuration to even affect the speeds. TSO and LRO were confirmed off by ifconfig. I didn't have any of the tunning options in the loader.conf file that I had before all of these changes were made. I did notice another post in the pfsense forums where this was happening during the development of 23.01 (https://forum.netgate.com/topic/177308/half-network-speed-after-upgrading) but apparently wasn't addressed before release. I'm hoping that this is something the developers are aware of/working on and would be willing to work with them on this.
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Great detail shared there, thanks for the effort! FWIW, I think this is related to the T520 card specifically. I ordered/installed a T6225-CR (to replace my T520's) and I do NOT have performance degradation with that chipset.
Not sure if that's just by chance or if the drivers have been better optimized compared to the T520 cards? Perhaps the T520 cards are just getting a little long in the tooth? Total assumptions, but this is definitely not an isolated problem.
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hoping that this is something the developers are aware of/working on
I would suggest looking for and/or opening an issue at Redmine.pfSense.org.
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If it is an issue with the Chelsio NIC specifically it's probably a change in the driver. In that case though I'd expect to see more reports in FreeBSD or even a bug report there. Not seeing anything relevant though:
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=chelsio -
I agree with Stephenw10 that this is probably something to do with the driver for the Chelsio t520 (possibly this specific line of cards). I pulled the card out this morning and put in a Intel X520 82599ES (pulled from a supermicro server) and installed that on the router and did the upgrade and was able to get full speeds through the intel card after the upgrade. (Also no errors reported on the interfaces. I was getting those before on the Chelsio card after the upgrade, but not consistently.) So not an issue with Pfsense as much as the driver in FreeBSD 14.0 (coming from 12-stable). I'll see if I can pick up a Chelsio T6 card in the future and test with that.
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I have been using a Chelsio T540-SO-CR for a few years now with pfSense and did not see any reduction in speed after upgrading to 23.01 - in fact, I saw a modest performance increase in certain cases. WAN connection here is symmetric 1 Gbit/s fiber, but the Chelsio is on the LAN side (WAN interface is Intel i210 I believe). Maybe that is the difference? What tunables do you guys have set for the Chelsio card?
