Problem with Slow Speeds
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Thanks for the reply!
Sorry for the lack of info I guess I overlooked it. Please let me know if I left anything out that would be of use in making a diagnosis.
This is a lab setting, the WAN that I am testing is a gigabit network and my target is a NAS server. I can point it at a RAM disk on the server to achieve wirespeed but for now it has difficulty maxing out just one of the drives on the server. The switch that I am using is a Procurve 1800-8g, an 8 port managed gigabit switch. I have looked at the switch during transfers and it is not showing any errors on the interfaces in use during the transfer. I have also searched this forum and found a similar post http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,22855.0.html
I followed the advice in that thread and looked at the shell during transfers to monitor errors or stray interrupts but everything is error-free and smooth, except for the lack of scaling to my max processor capacity!
The client that is the "master" of the transactions is a Phenom x4 at 3.3 gHz, I have done tests in the same configuration of server-computer-switch minus the pfbox and I can get 120+ MB/sec copying to/from RAM disks on the machines.
Something else to note that I tried hooking up a 10/100 laptop to the pfsense box in place of the Phenom and was expecting to see wirespeed at 100 Mbits but I was only coming close to 70 Mbits/sec! Tested without the box I can achieve wirespeed of 100Mbits in this configuration!
I believe that your assumption that my speed is limited by the PCI bus is a good one, I will explore getting a PCIe NIC and hope that solves the problem.
This box is purely for home use, I just wanted to learn more about pfsense. It will probably make its way to LAN parties about 3x per year though. I am interested in the ability to bond WAN connections.
Thanks for the help please let me know if there is anything else you can think of!
Dan
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Which packages are currently installed?
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Its just the default install right now. I just loaded it up and began testing.
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Suggest you read http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,22855.0.html and http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,23811.0.html
You could try some pings between the client and pfSense and the client and server to see how the round trip time changes with the increased number of hops.
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Thanks! I tried the tips in the post but everything looks normal.
I did some research on the onboard gigabit ports and they share a 4x PCIe link.
Any opinions on what else it may be?
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What differences did you observe in ping times?
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Here is an idea, I'm not sure if it is valid though. Your bottleneck could be your CPU still. I don't know if pfSense/FreeBSD will make a connection multi-threaded on your CPU. If it won't then when you are seeing 50% usage it's because one core is being maxed out and that's all the single thread can do. Just an idea though.
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At the moment, pf is not multi-threaded, so the firewall process itself doesn't scale across cores. (But other system processes like the GUI and services do)
There is work being done to alleviate this limitation, but it's not a simple problem and probably won't happen anytime soon.
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Here is an idea, I'm not sure if it is valid though. Your bottleneck could be your CPU still. I don't know if pfSense/FreeBSD will make a connection multi-threaded on your CPU. If it won't then when you are seeing 50% usage it's because one core is being maxed out and that's all the single thread can do. Just an idea though.
It would be worth taking some snapshots of the output of the shell command top -S or watching the RRD graph to see if you are maxing out a CPU.
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What differences did you observe in ping times?
My ping times are:
Connected to switch:
Avg= .301 ms
min=.270
max=.420pfbox:
WAN->LAN
Avg=.651 ms
min=.513
max=.869 -
Here is an idea, I'm not sure if it is valid though. Your bottleneck could be your CPU still. I don't know if pfSense/FreeBSD will make a connection multi-threaded on your CPU. If it won't then when you are seeing 50% usage it's because one core is being maxed out and that's all the single thread can do. Just an idea though.
It would be worth taking some snapshots of the output of the shell command top -S or watching the RRD graph to see if you are maxing out a CPU.
That's it!
top -S shows one CPU has idle time of 5% during the transfer, while the other had 95% idle time.
So apparently I am maxing out a single core.
Thanks for the help everyone!!!
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What processes are the top CPU consumers shown by top -S?
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What processes are the top CPU consumers shown by top -S?
top -SH is better. It will show both system and kernel threads.
