Hardware Sizing & Throughput Considerations

stephenw10

Are you expecting to see VLAN to VLAN traffic show up on pfSense? In many cases VLAN to VLAN traffic is handled entirely within the switch and doesn't get to the router.

I'm not actually running any VLANs at the moment so I can't check but if the VLANs are assigned as different interfaces in pfSense then I would expect any traffic between them to have to go through pfSense?
If traffic is bypassing pfSense and being routed by the switch then that's a big security hole! No?

Steve

GruensFroeschli

That's what i thought first as well.
However i think he means with VLAN to VLAN traffic actually traffic within a single VLAN.
At least it's formulated like this in the other thread.
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,39833.0.html

stephenw10

Ah! I see.

Steve

wallabybob

Yes, I took the question as VLAN traffic to same VLAN.

GruensFroeschli

@asterix:

Can anyone recommend a good Atom based passively cooled motherboard with the fastest Atom dual core processor. Dual gigabit with 8GB RAM support preferred but not a critical requirement.

Not sure if such a thing even exists.
The closest thing i currently see is this: http://www.fit-pc.com/web/fit-pc2/fit-pc2i-specifications/
(only 1 core and quite expensive at that….)
I have one to play around and get about 600Mbit throughput.
Or in the future: http://www.fit-pc.com/fit-pc3/ (not yet out).

stephenw10

Yep, I don't think you'll find an Atom chipset that supports 8GB.

Steve

Bai Shen

The i3's support 8GB and you can get them down to near Atom power levels. The hard part is finding the power supply in my experience.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/d510mo-intel-atom,2616-11.html

My i3 with an ATX board and 3 PCI NICs idles at 40W, but that's with a 430W PSU.

stephenw10

The graphs at that link are quite revealing. Those desktop Atoms have no powersaving features. Look at the D510, 28W at 0 load, 33W at 100% load. :o The Netbook atoms are much better <10W at idle.

Steve

asterix

fit PC is overrated and extremely expensive for the hardware config.

Yes I realized 8GB is not achievable for Atom mobo's yet. Which is the best Atom mobo with the fastest Atom processor that I can get right now? I may switch to FTTH in the coming months and would definitely need good WAN to LAN throughput.

How can I get the power down for the i5 Sandy Bridge I have right now? The thermaltake enclosure has zero air circulation and my processor runs 62C at idle times.. yeah I know it's hot. To make matters worse the PSU is almost touching the processor.. it's that close.. so a lot of heat is generated and no fans except of the PSU which is a joke. I even removed the stock thermal paste, got the expensive $15 CPU thermal paste from Staples and reapplied a good thin layer. But the that has not changed the temperature by even a degree. Tried cleaning and reapplying thrice but no change.

I need to get the power consumption on this down and maybe it will cool itself a bit.

stephenw10

Have you enabled powerd?

Steve

asterix

Yes. It tries to bring down the the processor to about 400 but it's not constant. Thinking about lowering the CPU and RAM power in the BIOS.

Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz
Current: 400 MHz, Max: 3601 MHz

Metu69salemi

You could find also next opportunity: Diagnostics:Command prompt, run```
sysctl -a | grep cpu

then you should find next kind text```
dev.cpu.0.freq: 3000

Then you can go to /boot/loader.conf.local and create a line with a smaller frequency, like 200.

stephenw10

Powerd should take care of all that for you. It depends which driver it's using though. It's only really effective when it uses a driver that can scale back the voltage as well as frequency. I'm not sure FreeBSD will have caught up with i5 yet.

Steve

Bai Shen

@stephenw10:

The graphs at that link are quite revealing. Those desktop Atoms have no powersaving features. Look at the D510, 28W at 0 load, 33W at 100% load. :o The Netbook atoms are much better <10W at idle.

Steve

Yeah, for some reason they didn't include speedstep in the desktop versions, so they run at full power all the time. It's another reason I went with the i3 instead.

stephenw10

@Bai:

It's another reason I went with the i3 instead.

Good choice! :)
It must have been a marketing decision. To differentiate between the two cpus. Same as Pentium-M vs Celeron-M.

Steve

asterix

I undervolted everything on the CPU a couple of days back. It has bought down my idle CPU temperature from 60C to 55C. The enclosure is much less warm than before. Undervolting the CPU hasn't impacted performance, though the CPU runs around 15 to 20% on heavy downloads. Glad it's working without problems till now.

Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz
Current: 200 MHz, Max: 1600 MHz

Speed bumps from 200/400 to 800/1200 frequently, Powerd in action?

Should I undervolt the RAM too? If yes, will that impact the performance? Bumping my 4GB RAM to 8GB this week.. need it for Snort and Squid.

stephenw10

I take it you are manually undervolting in the bios?
This usually only leads to instability. There will be some room for adjustment as the recommended voltage will be well within the tolerance on the cpu. If, say, you keep adjusting the voltage down what will happen is that you will reach a level at which the CPU starts making calculation errors at it's maximum frequency. The trouble is that with powerd enabled and such a fast cpu it will hardly ever run at maximum frequency.
If you are serious about reducing the voltage you need to run a stress test on the cpu to ensure it's stable.
Undervolting the ram will make almost no difference to power consumption or cpu temperature, I wouldn't bother.
Does your i5 have any speedstep like powersaving modes? I haven't looked into it.

Steve

asterix

Yes, I did the undervolting from the BIOS. Set the lowest possible value for all CPU settings along with the multiplier. Don't think pfSense can put this CPU into any kind of decent stress unless I have a Gigabit WAN bandwidth.. lol.

Do you recommend I switch back to the original BIOS settings and let powerd do the job?

stephenw10

It depends what powerd is doing, which depends on what driver it's using to control the cpu. Generally speaking using some sort of dynamic frequency/voltage control, like powerd, is a much better solution since it still gives you access to higher cpu powers if you need them.
Here are some results I had when testing my own box, a Pentium-M with enhanced speedstep.


[2.0-BETA4][root@pfSense.localdomain]/root(12): sysctl dev.cpu.0.freq=1500
dev.cpu.0.freq: 600 -> 1500
[2.0-BETA4][root@pfSense.localdomain]/root(13): mbmon
ioctl(smb0:open): No such file or directory

Temp.= 25.0, 32.0,  0.0; Rot.= 10384, 10546, 9375
Vcore = 1.33, 2.13; Volt. = 3.39, 5.13, 12.40, -12.28, -2.13

[2.0-BETA4][root@pfSense.localdomain]/root(14): sysctl dev.cpu.0.freq=600
dev.cpu.0.freq: 1500 -> 600
[2.0-BETA4][root@pfSense.localdomain]/root(15): mbmon
ioctl(smb0:open): No such file or directory

Temp.= 25.0, 31.0,  0.0; Rot.= 10384, 10384, 9375
Vcore = 0.96, 2.08; Volt. = 3.39, 5.13, 12.40, -12.28, -2.13

[2.0-BETA4][root@pfSense.localdomain]/root(10): sysctl dev.cpu.0.freq_levels
dev.cpu.0.freq_levels: 1500/-1 1200/-1 1000/-1 800/-1 600/-1

The cpu voltage is dropped a lot but only at low frequencies. See here for more details.
There are a number of packages available in FreeBSD to load the CPU, I used cpuburn.

Steve

Bai Shen

@stephenw10:

@Bai:

It's another reason I went with the i3 instead.

Good choice! :)
It must have been a marketing decision. To differentiate between the two cpus. Same as Pentium-M vs Celeron-M.

Steve

Well, it'd be a better choice if I could find a power supply smaller than 400W. I'm using a 430W I had laying around, but it's way overkill for the machine.