Soekris 6501 throughput
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Hi all.
I just replaced my aging Pentium III-based m0n0wall box with a new Soekris 6501-50 (1.0 GHz), and decided that since I'd be setting up the machine from scratch anyway, I'd give pfsense a try instead.
On my old machine, I had an Intel Pro 100 for the uplink and a dual-port Intel Pro 1000 for the internal network. The dual gig card was technically 64-bit PCI-X, but the machine had only 32-bit PCI slots, so it was not able to run at peak performance. That said, I was able to route roughly 270 Mbits/sec between subnets (which I considered admirable for such old hardware), but even at that, the CPU wouldn't be fully saturated so I assume that's the point where I ran out of bandwidth of the PCI bus.
My new Soekris, on the other hand, has the onboard quad gigabit adapters, verified by pciconf to be connected internally via PCIe. Unfortunately, I seem now to only be able to route about 210 Mbits/sec, which I find somewhat disappointing. While I don't expect anywhere near wireline speed, I was expecting the box to clock in somewhere around 400-500 Mbits/sec. This performance seems unchanged whether I have polling enabled or not, which I find somewhat surprising, but honestly I'd rather not have to deal with polling at all.
Now, granted, this is a home setup and I really have no actual need for any faster throughput than that, but… you know... boys and their toys or some such.
Is there anything I can do to tune the box to give me better throughput? Any input would be useful. I'm running an i386 2.1 snapshot (as I need ipv6 support), just updated last night to yesterday's build.
I should also point out that the Soekris is doing quite well at the thing I primarily bought it for. At idle, it draws about 90% less power than the machine it replaced.
One other point of note about my network: all three connected links (WAN, LAN, DMZ) on my Soekris are going back to my Nortel BayStack 380-24T core switch, with each port connected to a different VLAN. In tests before I have had separate pairs of machines connected to the switch move in excess of 900 Mbits/sec simultaneously (obviously on the same VLAN), so I know the switch isn't the problem here.
Thanks in advance for your input.
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I would have expected better than 210Mbps but not 400Mbps. For comparison the dual-core Atom D510 @1.6GHz can firewall/NAT around 500Mbps.
About the only other measure I can find is here: http://www.mail-archive.com/soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com/msg06824.htmlSteve
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Depending on what BIOS you're running your system might not be running at full speed.
http://soekris.com/media/software/changelog.txt
Also, disable PowerD if you've got it on, my system has a tendency to drop to 300MHz and then not come back up when needed…
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Ah, sorry, forgot to mention that I am running the latest BIOS.
