Throughput drop on Netgate 8200 MAX LAN/VLAN (ix1) with Suricata inline mode
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Good day!
Device: Netgate 8200 MAX
Interface: LAN/VLAN (ix1)With Suricata in inline mode, throughput falls from ~1 Gbps to ~300 Mbps.
With Suricata in legacy mode, throughput remains ~1 Gbps.
What might be causing this?
iperf results;
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You show a VLAN configured on the LAN physical interface. VLANs and netmap (the underlying FreeBSD kernel device used to support inline IPS mode operation) are not great friends
. While it can work, a VLAN interface requires the use of an emulated netmap adapter which is a software construct that is much less efficient than the hardware adapter netmap interfaces.Another issue that can severely affect throughput is the number of enabled rules. More rules means more CPU work and less throughput.
Lastly, you may need to fine-tune settings for the NIC adapter using sysctl variables. You would need to perform your own research for that. I have no experience with that and thus no tips to offer.
Legacy Mode uses the PCAP library to simply grab copies of packets traversing an interface. Suricata is then fed those copied packets to digest while the original packets continue on to the host. That means Legacy Mode will leak the initial packets and let the connection be made. Then, after Suricata has time to compare the packet or packets to the signatures and there is a match, a pfctl firewall API call is made to place the offending IP address into a pf table for subsequent blocking. Another API call is then made to flush any active states that are associated with the blocked IP.
Also noticed that you posted this same issue on the upstream Suricata forum. That will not help. The Suricata package on pfSense is highly customized and the developers upstream are not privy to the inner workings of the Suricata setup used in pfSense (nor in OPNsense, for that matter). Both *Sense products use a GUI front-end for managing Suricata. Suricata itself (the binary used on Linux and Windows) has no GUI. It is managed completely at the command line level. But that is not true on pfSense as the GUI code manages the underlying binary and controls the creation of the suricata.yaml file.
