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    D2500CC for a 120/20?

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    • L
      localhostx
      last edited by

      My pfsense is running on 20/5 Mbit/s connection speed and  have Squid,havp and snort packs.

      At max (20Mbit/s download) CPU usage of D2500cce goes up to 50%. Therefore, I don't recommend you d2500cce for 120Mbit connection.

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      • stephenw10S
        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
        last edited by

        It's hard to predict how it will scale with throughout because the D2500 is a 2 core, 4 thread CPU. Some of the processes in pfSense, notably pf, do not scale across cores.
        However that's still a useful real world number.

        Steve

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        • L
          localhostx
          last edited by

          @stephenw10:

          It's hard to predict how it will scale with throughout because the D2500 is a 2 core, 4 thread CPU. Some of the processes in pfSense, notably pf, do not scale across cores.
          However that's still a useful real world number.

          Steve

          D2500 is a core 2 core, 2 thread CPU. No HyperThreading is present.

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          • stephenw10S
            stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
            last edited by

            Huh, I stand corrected.

            Steve

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            • N
              n1ko
              last edited by

              @HakanTT:

              My pfsense is running on 20/5 Mbit/s connection speed and  have Squid,havp and snort packs.

              At max (20Mbit/s download) CPU usage of D2500cce goes up to 50%. Therefore, I don't recommend you d2500cce for 120Mbit connection.

              I ran 2x 100Mbps lines with a 1.6Ghz p-m (alot slower than the D2500 and single core). No problem, even with squid vpn (20Mbps upload). Snort is a bit cpu heavy, but your cpu usage seems weird if you are not confusing scaled down speeds & cpu -usage somehow.

              And that was with heavy usage (read bittorrent with a tons of connections). Office usage is alot friendlier for the cpu.

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              • stephenw10S
                stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                last edited by

                Don't underestimate the Pentium-M. It may be older but it will outperform the Atom on an clock-for-clock basis by ~60%. Perhaps more depending on the application. E.g. http://www.mydigitallife.info/intel-atom-initial-benchmarking-data-vs-pentium-and-celeron-m-processors-before-official-release/ Admittedly that is the first gen. Atom.
                That combined with the single-threaded-ness of pf means that it's not a fair comparison.

                Steve

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                • T
                  tirsojrp
                  last edited by

                  This chart can help. It is focused on single thread performance. In this benchmark Pentium M beats all Atoms.

                  http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

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                  • stephenw10S
                    stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                    last edited by

                    That does show it up nicely.
                    Even the Atom D2700 at 2.13GHz is beaten by the Pentium-M 1.2GHz in a single thread test.  :o

                    Steve

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                    • G
                      gekko
                      last edited by

                      Would be the D2500CCE enough to handle VPN connections with 50Mbps/10Mbps? I´m not sure to consider a VIA C7 1.5 GHz instead the Intel Atom.

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                      • stephenw10S
                        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                        last edited by

                        The D2500 is likely to give similar vpn performance to the D510 that was extensively tested by pfSense developer Seth, here.
                        The D2500 is clocked slightly faster but doesn't support hyperthreading (see posts above). It will manage 50Mbps is one direction.

                        The Via C7 is a far less powerful cpu but has onboard encryption hardware in the form of Via Padlock. I've not tested it so maybe search the forum for some numbers on that.

                        Steve

                        Edit: Numbers seem a little sparse! I found this: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,45430.msg237835.html#msg237835
                        A 1GHz C7 can do 26Mbps OpenVPN @ 75% CPU use. Take from that what you will.  ;)

                        A better result is here: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,19818.msg104253.html#msg104253

                        I got 45Mps IPSec AES256 throughput measured by iperf on a 500Mhz VIA C7

                        So you should have no problems acheiving 50Mbps with a cpu three times faster.  :) I would speculate that in the first result I gave the Padlock engine is not being used.

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                        • G
                          gekko
                          last edited by

                          Thank you Steve. I will try the VIA C7 1.5 GHz. If its allowed, here another link with some benchmarks i just found. And it seems that this CPU will be able to handle this throughput with Padlock. :)
                          http://www.hacom.net/kb/ipsec-performance-pfsense-firewall-appliance

                          My selected Board, iknow that this kind of Realtek NIC´s are not the best. But i found a very cheap complete system with case and power supply for 83€ incl. shipping. Thx for help. And i hope that 1 GB RAM should be enough for normal Internet Traffic and VPN.

                          http://www.jetwaycomputer.com/spec/J7F4K1G5D.pdf

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                          • stephenw10S
                            stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                            last edited by

                            Ah yes, I forgot Hacom had C7 machines.  :)

                            Steve

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                            • G
                              gekko
                              last edited by

                              Hi stephenw10,

                              i have selected a 1.2 GHz VIA C7 Eden which doesnt need a cooling fan. My first results were

                              • 128 bit AES-CBC 68% cpu usage and a maximum of 37 Mbit/sec
                              • VPN connection on my PC can handle 43 Mbit

                              More or less its ok, but i hoped in the beginning that this CPU would be able to reach the same speed as my PC :(

                              dmesg | grep padlock
                              padlock0: <aes-cbc,sha1,sha256>on motherboard</aes-cbc,sha1,sha256>

                              kldstat
                              Id Refs Address    Size    Name
                              1    1 0xc0400000 ebb178  kernel

                              Test with cryptodev

                              openssl speed -elapsed -evp a        es128 -engine cryptodev
                              engine "cryptodev" set.
                              You have chosen to measure elapsed time instead of user CPU time.
                              To get the most accurate results, try to run this
                              program when this computer is idle.
                              Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 16 size blocks: 685987 aes-128-cbc's in 3.01s
                              Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 64 size blocks: 669361 aes-128-cbc's in 3.01s
                              Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 256 size blocks: 612256 aes-128-cbc's in 3.01s
                              Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 1024 size blocks: 460680 aes-128-cbc's in 3.01s
                              Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 8192 size blocks: 87128 aes-128-cbc's in 3.01s
                              OpenSSL 0.9.8n 24 Mar 2010
                              built on: date not available
                              options:bn(64,32) md2(int) rc4(idx,int) des(ptr,risc1,16,long) aes(partial) blowfish(idx)
                              compiler: cc
                              available timing options: USE_TOD HZ=128 [sysconf value]
                              timing function used: gettimeofday
                              The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
                              type            16 bytes    64 bytes    256 bytes  1024 bytes  8192 bytes
                              aes-128-cbc      3650.45k    14238.43k    52094.96k  156788.82k  237206.54k

                              Test with padlock

                              openssl speed -elapsed -evp aes128 -engine padlock
                              engine "padlock" set.
                              You have chosen to measure elapsed time instead of user CPU time.
                              To get the most accurate results, try to run this
                              program when this computer is idle.
                              Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 16 size blocks: 10512439 aes-128-cbc's in 3.01s
                              Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 64 size blocks: 8872721 aes-128-cbc's in 3.01s
                              Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 256 size blocks: 5276426 aes-128-cbc's in 3.01s
                              Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 1024 size blocks: 2031673 aes-128-cbc's in 3.01s
                              Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 8192 size blocks: 300961 aes-128-cbc's in 3.00s
                              OpenSSL 0.9.8n 24 Mar 2010
                              built on: date not available
                              options:bn(64,32) md2(int) rc4(idx,int) des(ptr,risc1,16,long) aes(partial) blowfish(idx)
                              compiler: cc
                              available timing options: USE_TOD HZ=128 [sysconf value]
                              timing function used: gettimeofday
                              The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
                              type            16 bytes    64 bytes    256 bytes  1024 bytes  8192 bytes
                              aes-128-cbc      55956.91k  188730.29k  448928.58k  690283.55k  820769.76k

                              Its possible that the Realtek NIC´s are the bottleneck?! I mean 68% cpu usage in "top" is ok, no other processes are visible with higher usage than 0,x %.

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                              • stephenw10S
                                stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                                last edited by

                                People have reported extreme bottlenecks using Realtek cards, like down to 20Mbps, but personally I've never seen anything below 80Mbps unless it was configured incorrectly.
                                The Realtek NICs on your board are Gigabit anyway so you should not be seeing that problem. The Gigabit Realtek NICs are a far superior device to the older 10/100 NICs the gave them a bad rep.

                                Try running 'top -SH' to see all the processes.

                                I have never used the padlock engine personally, I had assumed it was tied into the crypto framework but perhaps not.

                                Steve

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                                • G
                                  gekko
                                  last edited by

                                  top -sh output runnig ~ 30 Mbit download

                                  last pid: 15728;  load averages:  0.47,  0.21,  0.12                                                  up 0+20:07:24  14:33:52
                                  109 processes: 4 running, 91 sleeping, 14 waiting
                                  CPU: 28.4% user,  0.0% nice, 34.0% system, 20.5% interrupt, 17.2% idle
                                  Mem: 46M Active, 17M Inact, 57M Wired, 232K Cache, 58M Buf, 805M Free
                                  Swap:

                                  PID USERNAME PRI NICE  SIZE    RES STATE    TIME  WCPU COMMAND
                                  46559 root    109    0  5116K  4112K RUN      9:05 57.96% openvpn
                                    10 root    171 ki31    0K    8K RUN    18.5H 19.97% idle
                                    11 root    -28    -    0K  120K RUN    12:06 19.97% {swi5: +}

                                  vmstat- i output….
                                  re0 WAN Port
                                  re1 LAN Port

                                  interrupt                          total      rate
                                  irq3: uart1                            2          0
                                  irq4: uart0                            2          0
                                  irq14: ata0                        18808          0
                                  irq18: re0                      17532120        239
                                  irq19: re1                      16597733        226
                                  cpu0: timer                    29256276        400
                                  Total                          63404941        867

                                  I haven´t configured my IPTV (but not in use), perhaps this is a cause I´m loosing bandwidth. Installation was done using a 4 GB CF card.

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                                  • stephenw10S
                                    stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                                    last edited by

                                    Hmm, well it's definitely not using all your system resources then.
                                    Is that 30Mpbs over VPN or just an upstream restriction?

                                    Steve

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                                    • G
                                      gekko
                                      last edited by

                                      I am using my pfSense router to connect to an external VPN provider. So the router is managing everything, connected 24h to the provider. My VDSL2 can handle 50Mbit/10 Mbit
                                      Using OpenVPN on my PC ~ 43 Mbit down

                                      Using my router as client (1.2 GHz Eden C7 / 1GB-RAM) ~ 36 Mbit. I dont know how the other user was managing 45 Mbit with a 500 MHz CPU Via Padlock support. Or he meaned only the throughput and his PC was not running the OpenVPN client? hmm

                                      I recognized many collisions in my status –> Interface (more than 11000 within 2 days.)

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                                      • stephenw10S
                                        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                                        last edited by

                                        One significant difference is that he was using IPSec not OpenVPN. I believe it is easier to specify the encryption engine for IPSec but I never tried it. It could be that you are not using the Padlock engine correctly.
                                        In that post he also says that without Padlock he got 12Mbps from his 500MHz C7. The rates you are seeing could line up with that.

                                        Steve

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                                        • G
                                          gekko
                                          last edited by

                                          I have added the command line into my openvpn.conf as well to ensure the proper start/load of padlock. It was shown during openvpn start. So it can be that my measurement (using OpenVPN as client) can not be compared with the measurement with IPsec.
                                          My vpn provider is only supporting OpenVPN, L2PT/Ipsec and PPTP. I have two options now

                                          • Live with that and use my PC´s to connect through pfsense
                                          • Buy stronger hardware (for example the Intel Atom D2500CEE or a greater VIA CPU with padlock (mini-itx and fanless needed)

                                          At the end, too bad that i haven´t bought the 1.5 GHz VIA C7 board, but this one had a fan. I assume that the additional 300 MHz would be enough for the needed 6-7 Mbit VPN throughput :)
                                          –-----------------------------------
                                          Modify:

                                          I found now this page with some guides to improve the throughput
                                          https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/Gigabit_Networks_Linux

                                          I will try it today at home again. Ok i have not a Gigabit Network connection but some commands would perhaps help.

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                                          • G
                                            gekko
                                            last edited by

                                            hi stephenw10,

                                            a short feedback. It is running very well but i dont know the root cause. 42Mbit AES-256bit-CBC@60% cpu usage. I have recognized that using SSH or the webinterface is dropping the download speed extremly for some seconds. If i close all these applications the speed is stable. thx for support

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