Slow - aborted Pfsense installation
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I put pfsense this evening on a 400Mhz PII Compaq with 64MB. This machine ran IPcop (Linux) before just fine with two ethernet interfaces.
Pfsense installation went through without major issues. However:
The machine became incredibly slow. The text menu on the machine itself gave the response of an old CPM machine twenty five years ago.
The webGUI on a 733Mhz PIII was almost unusable.
Is it just us having slow machines or is there some other issue here ? Too little memory ?
Anyway I had to take pfsense off again because we need the network tomorrow running.
The main reason I wanted to try pfsense was to see AltQ in action. The rave review of one of the posters here regarding his VOIP QOS got me hooked.
I find it hard to believe that pfsense is so slow as I experienced and would be interested in for all hints on what is going on.
In any case: thanks for making the distribution available. It looks very promising.
Best regards,
geeJay
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pfSense runs rather fast at a pcengines WRAP, an embedded platform with a 266 MHz and 128 MB RAM. It can push up to 28 mbit/s in factory default configuration. Some devs are using even soekris 4501, boards with 133 MHz and 64 MB RAM. Even this works though 64 MB is really the low end configuration. Your issues must be somehow hardware related. Can you post more details about your hardware?
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Ok, I have revisited Pfsense. It appears that some sloppy net-mask configuration in the wan interface slowed down things.
I have pfsense running now and IT ROCKS. The QOS seems to work fine - I am trying to hold back my enthusiasm until the weekdays when our provider maxes-out his pipes.
In any case I am most pleased that I got HFSC to work. I have a leased 2Mbit ethernet line here which seems to be shaped by the provider. On weekends I get bandwidth up to 8Mbits.
My goal was to keep the possibility to use the 8Mbit when available and still have QOS for VOIP during weekdays when the pipe is much busier.
So I configured the root queue at 2Mbit and removed the max limits on the default and lower priority queues. I capped only the top priority VOIP queue which has a guaranteed bandwidth. That setup seems to work.
I made some tests with downloads at 8Mbit with an fast server at the other end and VOIP does to get through fine.
I had previously a nasty VOIP problem namely that for a second after the other party picked up the phone I could not hear the start of the conversation. The QOS seemed to kick-in only with some slight delay losing some traffic. The QOS ran on IPCOP with HFSC. That problem seems to be gone.
Anyway, I believe that if PFSENSE would stress more its QOS strengths that it will have a great future. The QOS wizard is just great and saves a lot of work.
Thanks guys for making PFSense available. IPCOP has been deleted from the harddisk and replaced by Pfsense. I am keeping my fingers crossed for Monday, though :-)
GeeJay
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Good news ;D