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    Intel DN2800mt x64 2.0.3-2.1 bandwidth

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    • J
      Jbmeth007
      last edited by

      correct.  one side of the current vlan to the wan on the second pfsense box to my computer directly…...

      I have one in place now thats a power hog so I dabbled in atom to save, Watt i don't know

      I found it i think.  I have to reinstall then change this setting to see if i have the same result.  right now as i type its transfering @ 602Mbit

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      • K
        kejianshi
        last edited by

        Cool - So my current drive has about a MTTF of 1.5 million hours which is similar to a great SSD, so if there is no benefit other than wattage, I'll leave it be.  I usually do things for a particular reason, not just to be trendy, so if the SSD isn't going to bump my performance, I'll wait for a drive failure to replace.  With this drive its probably going be about 6 more years minimum.

        Still no luck tracking down the bandwidth killing culprit?

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        • J
          Jbmeth007
          last edited by

          yeah i tracked it down,  for some reason if powerd is not enabled which it isn't by default the power state of the cpu is missrepresented i believe.  or it isn't running full throttle.  or reported wrong,  something along the lines of the speedstep control.. anyway when I set powerd to hiadaptive my bandwidth doubles.  now, you would think MAXimum would be best performing.  in this case it is the worst.   its almost like they are totally reversed.  im sure if powerd is off its max by default per say.  anyway problem solved.  it pulled 75MB/s from my NAS which is equivalent to 600+

          Beforehand it was only pulling 22-30MB/s

          As far as the SSD goes, yeah it will slightly improve performance using cache type "squid"  but for operation it primarily for power savings.  if you don't use any cache and not worried about an additional 5-15 watts depending on drive.. I dropped 6-7 watts swapping mine from an WD 80gb caviar. theres really not that big of advantage.  especially for home use.  just about any off the shelf hard drive for the past 10 years can do at least 50MB/s  thats plenty for pulling in a corporate type account.  The SSD will find the files a little quicker and push them along. but were talking milliseconds there.

          All in all the project came from a 75W off the wall Dell optiplex 755 to a 14W atom.  I can probably tweak bios settings to drop another few.  While the 755 can reach higher bandwidth. i'll probably never be seeing 800+ at home.  By the time we reach something like that from our ISP something better will come along.

          Core 2 duo Machine = 11.09Mb/W  Atom = 43Mb/W

          built for $67

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          • K
            kejianshi
            last edited by

            I have an Atom boxes like yours, just not here.  I'll check the powerd feature on all of them because of your hard work.

            (I had a fan go bad in one, so I'm expecting it to come back to me any day now)

            I'm not at all sure it even needs the dang fan but its noisy, so they are sending it to me.

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            • J
              Jbmeth007
              last edited by

              @kejianshi:

              I have an Atom boxes like yours, just not here.  I'll check the powerd feature on all of them because of your hard work.

              (I had a fan go bad in one, so I'm expecting it to come back to me any day now)

              I'm not at all sure it even needs the dang fan but its noisy, so they are sending it to me.

              Yeah they really don't  i have a fan on my chassis just for the hell of it cause it was sitting there already.  i could drop the fan and save another 2W.  i have it trolling around 20% to keep it fairly quiet.
              With the chassis open the cpu sits at 19c and closed with fan @ 10% 24c  no fan may be around 30c

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              • J
                Jbmeth007
                last edited by

                Another nice bonus, with a computer directly tied into the cable modem i was pulling a solid 55.4Mbps,  with this pfense on 2.1 it allows me to pull dhcp6 from modem and passes along to all machines.  ran another speed test and picked up another 2Mb…  so im happy ping dropped a couple around here locally but still solid 33ms midway across the country

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                • K
                  kejianshi
                  last edited by

                  Pulling that much bandwidth isn't something unique to pfsense.  Even my cheapy linksys can do as high as 80 or 90.  But doing anything big with the bandwidth like VPN does take something like pfsense.

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                  • J
                    Jbmeth007
                    last edited by

                    @kejianshi:

                    Pulling that much bandwidth isn't something unique to pfsense.  Even my cheapy linksys can do as high as 80 or 90.  But doing anything big with the bandwidth like VPN does take something like pfsense.

                    I've messed around with linksys and dd-wrt tomato etc.  yeah i can pull the bandwidth of 55 no problem on them..  but when it comes to ping their all over the place, or any heavy load..  they fall like a ton of bricks.  i was even contemplating purchasing a netgear 4000 series, or maybe even an AC router.  but they "ALL" have 128mg or less and the majority of them fall in the 32mb range.  not so good if your trying to pull a p2p at full bandwidth.

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                    • K
                      kejianshi
                      last edited by

                      Yeah - They have weak state tables and the CPUs are on the ragged edge of maxed out with a fast connection. And VPN…  That maxes the CPU at only 5MB or so.  Its much weaker than the pfsense if you are doing anything other than "speedtest.net"

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                      • J
                        Jbmeth007
                        last edited by

                        I completely agree.  Now I gotta make sure my coffee pot pulls its ip

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                        • K
                          kejianshi
                          last edited by

                          Don't forget to check your sneakers…

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                          • W
                            wallabybob
                            last edited by

                            @Jbmeth007:

                            No change there either.. this is what my loader.conf.local file looks like now.

                            kern.cam.boot_delay=10000
                            kern.em.nmbclusters="131072"
                            hw.em.num_queues=1
                            hw.em.fc_setting=1

                            does this look right or am i going to have to do one for each for example.
                            *hw.em0.num_queues=1
                            hw.em1.num_queues=1

                            I believe the number of queues setting has no effect on the flow control setting. I think if you want to set queues individually for each interface it would be done by hw.em.1.num_queues=1 rather than hw.em1.num.queues.

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                            • stephenw10S
                              stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                              last edited by

                              Ah, interesting result. Good to see you got the expected throughput in the end. Does it now peg one of the cores at 100%?

                              The interesting thing here is that usually, if you have speedstep enabled, the CPU shows higher usage since it's running slower on average. Yet yours showed less than 100% even when powerd was not enabled. Odd.  :-
                              The majority of Atom users probably have desktop chips, DXXX. The netbook chips have far greater power saving features, I wonder if that's causing this? Anyway good to have a solution thanks to your persistence.

                              Steve

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                              • J
                                Jbmeth007
                                last edited by

                                @stephenw10:

                                Does it now peg one of the cores at 100%?

                                no but close  still 11-20% left on idle

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                                • J
                                  jasonlitka
                                  last edited by

                                  @stephenw10:

                                  @Jason:

                                  I've seen +900Mbps through my DN2800MT as well.

                                  Seems surprisingly high for an Atom board. You do anything special? It that actually through?

                                  Steve

                                  Nothing special, just a pretty much out-of-the-box install of 2.1.  Powerd is enabled but is set to hiadaptive.  On adaptive I had issues with the CPU throttling back and then not speeding back up when there was actually load.  Testing was done with iperf (TCP) from the  Thunderbolt Gig-E adapter on my rMBP on the LAN side to a Dell Precision T3500 on the WAN side.  There were no packages installed and just a single firewall rule to allow the iperf traffic to pass through.  CPU usage was high on a single core but not maxed out; I don't remember the exact number.

                                  I can break anything.

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                                  • J
                                    Jbmeth007
                                    last edited by

                                    @Jason:

                                    @stephenw10:

                                    @Jason:

                                    I've seen +900Mbps through my DN2800MT as well.

                                    Seems surprisingly high for an Atom board. You do anything special? It that actually through?

                                    Steve

                                    Nothing special, just a pretty much out-of-the-box install of 2.1.  Powerd is enabled but is set to hiadaptive.  On adaptive I had issues with the CPU throttling back and then not speeding back up when there was actually load.  Testing was done with iperf (TCP) from the  Thunderbolt Gig-E adapter on my rMBP on the LAN side to a Dell Precision T3500 on the WAN side.  There were no packages installed and just a single firewall rule to allow the iperf traffic to pass through.  CPU usage was high on a single core but not maxed out; I don't remember the exact number.

                                    Oh please don't tell me theres more bandwidth to be had.  I'll have to restart the entire thread.  LOL  im at 600Mbps now,  your saying your seeing 800+  what adaptor/s  it only has a pci-e x1.  I'm using a dual nic intel pro/1000 pt on a x1 ribbon cable with notched x1 slot to direct the x4 lane card to operate on x1 2.5Gbps lane.

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                                    • J
                                      jasonlitka
                                      last edited by

                                      @Jbmeth007:

                                      @Jason:

                                      @stephenw10:

                                      @Jason:

                                      I've seen +900Mbps through my DN2800MT as well.

                                      Seems surprisingly high for an Atom board. You do anything special? It that actually through?

                                      Steve

                                      Nothing special, just a pretty much out-of-the-box install of 2.1.  Powerd is enabled but is set to hiadaptive.  On adaptive I had issues with the CPU throttling back and then not speeding back up when there was actually load.  Testing was done with iperf (TCP) from the  Thunderbolt Gig-E adapter on my rMBP on the LAN side to a Dell Precision T3500 on the WAN side.  There were no packages installed and just a single firewall rule to allow the iperf traffic to pass through.  CPU usage was high on a single core but not maxed out; I don't remember the exact number.

                                      Oh please don't tell me theres more bandwidth to be had.  I'll have to restart the entire thread.   LOL  im at 600Mbps now,  your saying your seeing 800+  what adaptor/s  it only has a pci-e x1.  I'm using a dual nic intel pro/1000 pt on a x1 ribbon cable with notched x1 slot to direct the x4 lane card to operate on x1 2.5Gbps lane.

                                      It's a quad-port i350.  I used the angled riser and notched the slot to use the card.

                                      I can break anything.

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                                      • K
                                        kejianshi
                                        last edited by

                                        You can get about 2 gigabit on that (4 bidirectional) realistically, although technically the specs will say 5 bi-directional.
                                        Either way, PCIe x1 slot isn't any speed bump for anyone here.  Its a good use of that port. Why they made that an x4 is beyond me,
                                        but I use mine in graphics slot.

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                                        • J
                                          jasonlitka
                                          last edited by

                                          @kejianshi:

                                          You can get about 2 gigabit on that (4 bidirectional) realistically, although technically the specs will say 5 bi-directional.
                                          Either way, PCIe x1 slot isn't any speed bump for anyone here.  Its a good use of that port. Why they made that an x4 is beyond me,
                                          but I use mine in graphics slot.

                                          The i350-T4 is a x4 card because at a 1.0 link, where many of these are used, a x1 link only does 250MB/s in each direction and you need 500MB/s to fully utilize all 4 ports.

                                          I can break anything.

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                                          • K
                                            kejianshi
                                            last edited by

                                            Are 4 ports being tested simultaneously or just 1?

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