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    Unbelieveably bad performance

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
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    • stephenw10S
      stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
      last edited by

      Hmm, well that's interesting. You specified Realtek emulation in the Xen config then I assume? I'm unfamiliar with Xen.
      I would try removing the paravirtualised NIC support in Xen so that pfSense goes back to using the re driver and see if that makes any difference. Additionally I would set it to emulate Intel NICs rather than Realtek.
      As I say though I can't really see why the xn driver should be causing problems in your basic setup. Try removing all the hardware offloading options in System: Advanced: Networking:

      Steve

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      • D
        Douglas Haber
        last edited by

        @stephenw10:

        Hmm, well that's interesting. You specified Realtek emulation in the Xen config then I assume? I'm unfamiliar with Xen.
        I would try removing the paravirtualised NIC support in Xen so that pfSense goes back to using the re driver and see if that makes any difference. Additionally I would set it to emulate Intel NICs rather than Realtek.
        As I say though I can't really see why the xn driver should be causing problems in your basic setup. Try removing all the hardware offloading options in System: Advanced: Networking:

        Steve

        Realtek is the default with XenServer. Switching to Intel emulation requires some hackery I am not ready to be doing yet. I don't want to change Xen necessarily.

        EDIT: By hackery, I mean just a small change really (http://www.netservers.co.uk/articles/open-source-howtos/citrix_e1000_gigabit) but I also have other VM's running, and don't want to change too much.

        I found this, which is interesting..

        ssh from the Windows PV host to the FreeBSD PV DomU host appears to work
        fine. Attempting to 'route' traffic from the Windows PV host 'through' the
        FreeBSD PV DomU fails - pings go, DNS goes, initial TCP 'setups' go - but
        stuff dies thereafter (i.e. may be packet size related or something).

        Sounds pretty much like my issue (re: http not working) even though as another poster mentioned, requests are there.

        http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-xen/2014-February/002018.html

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        • johnpozJ
          johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
          last edited by

          ok this looks different than before..

          So looks like your getting back the syn,ack..  But then when you send a get, a 404 is sent back..  But then that is not working..

          GET / HTTP/1.1
          Host: 65.98.6.38
          Connection: keep-alive
          Cache-Control: max-age=0
          Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,/;q=0.8
          User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.95 Safari/537.36
          Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch
          Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8

          HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
          Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 13:45:34 GMT
          Server: Apache/2.2.22 (Debian)

          Then on the lan side you don't see the get??  Something really odd going on here..

          From your wan sniff you can see that 404 was sent, but then you see retrans on the get and 404.  But on the lan side not even seeing the get..  Were these sniffs taken at the same time?

          edit: Ok looks like these were taken at different times..  wan goes from 7:45:31 to 7:47:14  But lan is from 7:47:31 to 7:49:16…  You really need to take capture at the same time.. And wouldn't hurt to have sniff running over the same time period on the webserver.

          wansniffinfo.png
          wansniffinfo.png_thumb

          An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
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          • D
            Douglas Haber
            last edited by

            @johnpoz:

            ok this looks different than before..

            So looks like your getting back the syn,ack..  But then when you send a get, a 404 is sent back..  But then that is not working..

            GET / HTTP/1.1
            Host: 65.98.6.38
            Connection: keep-alive
            Cache-Control: max-age=0
            Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,/;q=0.8
            User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.95 Safari/537.36
            Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch
            Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8

            HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
            Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 13:45:34 GMT
            Server: Apache/2.2.22 (Debian)

            Then on the lan side you don't see the get??  Something really odd going on here..

            From your wan sniff you can see that 404 was sent, but then you see retrans on the get and 404.  But on the lan side not even seeing the get..  Were these sniffs taken at the same time?

            1. the 404 is to be expected. i wanted a simple thing to be spit back for testing purposes, rather than several MB webpage ,which is what would be on it in production. there is nothing to be served on the webserver now.

            2. very close.  couple of seconds apart max. i'll work on a set up exact same time ones.

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            • johnpozJ
              johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
              last edited by

              no they are not a couple of seconds apart.. they are completely different time frames.  See my edit.

              An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
              If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
              Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
              SG-4860 24.11 | Lab VMs 2.7.2, 24.11

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              • D
                Douglas Haber
                last edited by

                @johnpoz:

                no they are not a couple of seconds apart.. they are completely different time frames.  See my edit.

                I'll run a new set, same time. Hang on.

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                • D
                  Douglas Haber
                  last edited by

                  Same URL's. Same time. Literally within 1-2 seconds this time, as quick as I could move cursor and hit go.

                  No webserver capture in this group, though

                  EDIT: let me see if i can do it again and turn up verbosity on pfsense, it's capture is way way less verbose with the LAN interface than my tcpdump was for the WAN

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                  • johnpozJ
                    johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
                    last edited by

                    well wan is going to see all the noise of a typical wan connection ;)  I would expect to see lots of noise ;)

                    An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                    If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                    Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
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                    • D
                      Douglas Haber
                      last edited by

                      @johnpoz:

                      well wan is going to see all the noise of a typical wan connection ;)  I would expect to see lots of noise ;)

                      I forgot to take of the default limit of 100 packets on the pf capture.  :-X

                      Redoing now

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                      • D
                        Douglas Haber
                        last edited by

                        @johnpoz:

                        well wan is going to see all the noise of a typical wan connection ;)  I would expect to see lots of noise ;)

                        Correctly done dumps are there now.

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                        • marcellocM
                          marcelloc
                          last edited by

                          Are you using xentools on this vm?

                          http://blog.feld.me/posts/2014/07/pfsense-on-citrix-xenserver/

                          I've played with a 2.2 beta version on xen server with ~800mbit throughput IIRC.

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                          Help a community developer! ;D

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                          • johnpozJ
                            johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
                            last edited by

                            Ok so looking at these dumps..

                            You have two connections coming in to 80, one from source port 43293 and another on 27618 both from this 67.81.220.99 IP

                            You see the syn,ack back and then the ack from the 43293 connection.  But you never see the ack from the syn,ack sent to 27618

                            You also see a get, an ack to that and then sending of the 404..  Clearly you can see the stuff pfsense gets on its wan it sends on to the lan.  Stuff it sees on the lan it sends out the wan.

                            I see pfsense doing what it is suppose to do, it forwards on the packets..  But then on the wan side it seems that box is not getting the responses what were sent, so it sends retrans..  And on the lan side it doesn't get the reponse it expected so it retrans.

                            Looks to me you have a issue with communication on the wan side..

                            So you see the get come in on wan, you set it sent on to the lan, you see the lan ack back, you see it send 404..  But then you see inbound from 220.99 saying hey Im going to resend this get because I never got an ack..  And it clearly didn't get the 404 that was sent.

                            Pfsense from your sniff clearly put it on the wire - but seems to be getting lost..  And 220.99 is not getting it.

                            sniffs.png
                            sniffs.png_thumb

                            An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                            If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                            Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
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                            • C
                              cmb
                              last edited by

                              The LAN capture has broken TCP checksums on all the retransmitted traffic. Not on everything though, and not null checksums (which would be the scenario where it's capturing before the NIC's checksum offloading adds the checksum), which suggests that's the likely cause. Have you disabled hardware checksum offloading under System>Advanced, Networking tab? Probably best to reboot afterwards.

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                              • D
                                Douglas Haber
                                last edited by

                                @marcelloc:

                                Are you using xentools on this vm?

                                http://blog.feld.me/posts/2014/07/pfsense-on-citrix-xenserver/

                                I've played with a 2.2 beta version on xen server with ~800mbit throughput IIRC.

                                I had/have same issue tools or not.

                                edit: throughput on the pfsense VM itself has been perfect this entire time. no slowness at all. it's only VM's behind the VM.

                                @johnpoz:

                                Ok so looking at these dumps..

                                You have two connections coming in to 80, one from source port 43293 and another on 27618 both from this 67.81.220.99 IP

                                You see the syn,ack back and then the ack from the 43293 connection.  But you never see the ack from the syn,ack sent to 27618

                                You also see a get, an ack to that and then sending of the 404..  Clearly you can see the stuff pfsense gets on its wan it sends on to the lan.  Stuff it sees on the lan it sends out the wan.

                                I see pfsense doing what it is suppose to do, it forwards on the packets..  But then on the wan side it seems that box is not getting the responses what were sent, so it sends retrans..  And on the lan side it doesn't get the reponse it expected so it retrans.

                                Looks to me you have a issue with communication on the wan side..

                                So you see the get come in on wan, you set it sent on to the lan, you see the lan ack back, you see it send 404..  But then you see inbound from 220.99 saying hey Im going to resend this get because I never got an ack..  And it clearly didn't get the 404 that was sent.

                                Pfsense from your sniff clearly put it on the wire - but seems to be getting lost..  And 220.99 is not getting it.

                                Not sure where the issue is then, if it is "WAN side", since every other box connected to that hand off from the datacenter is experiencing no issues whatsoever, and as previously stated, FreeBSD 10 (or I guess pfSense 2.2) is the only thing experiencing issue. The same exact WAN uplink/cable/etc in the same hypervisor can do full line rate in the other VM's.

                                @cmb:

                                The LAN capture has broken TCP checksums on all the retransmitted traffic. Not on everything though, and not null checksums (which would be the scenario where it's capturing before the NIC's checksum offloading adds the checksum), which suggests that's the likely cause. Have you disabled hardware checksum offloading under System>Advanced, Networking tab? Probably best to reboot afterwards.

                                I did disable it, but haven't tried rebooting. Trying now.

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                                • D
                                  Douglas Haber
                                  last edited by

                                  @cmb:

                                  The LAN capture has broken TCP checksums on all the retransmitted traffic. Not on everything though, and not null checksums (which would be the scenario where it's capturing before the NIC's checksum offloading adds the checksum), which suggests that's the likely cause. Have you disabled hardware checksum offloading under System>Advanced, Networking tab? Probably best to reboot afterwards.

                                  Disabled, and rebooted. No change.

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                                  • stephenw10S
                                    stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                                    last edited by

                                    @Douglas:

                                    throughput on the pfsense VM itself has been perfect this entire time. no slowness at all. it's only VM's behind the VM.

                                    How are you testing the 'throughput' on the pfSense VM?

                                    Steve

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                                    • D
                                      Douglas Haber
                                      last edited by

                                      @stephenw10:

                                      @Douglas:

                                      throughput on the pfsense VM itself has been perfect this entire time. no slowness at all. it's only VM's behind the VM.

                                      How are you testing the 'throughput' on the pfSense VM?

                                      Steve

                                      I suppose I should have been more specific. The WAN connection is a 100mbps handoff from the datacenter.

                                      I added a third interface (OPT1) to the VM and added it to a separate 2nd LAN so I could "speak" to the pfSense VM and run iperf to it. I was able to run an iperf and without any delay push significant traffic on both the OPT and WAN, interfaces

                                      And can access port 80 on the pfSense VM if I forward it for "OOB" on the WAN as well.

                                      Was also able to pull down few gigabyte sized files to the pfsense vm (or rather, /dev/null), at full 100Mbps also, no delay, disconnect, or otherwise.

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                                      • johnpozJ
                                        johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
                                        last edited by

                                        I didn't mean to say it was a WAN connection problem - what I meant is that pfsenes is putting it on its wan interface - and for some reason wan device is not seeing it.  Your pfsense is VM..  It seems to me you got a problem in that system on the wan side..

                                        Again –- from pfsense point of view all the packets it sees on its wan interface are being forwarded to lan, the lan answer and those are sent out its wan..  If you clearly have an issue between the wan guy requesting the data and where its being requested from.

                                        But from your sniff pfsense was doing what it was suppose to do..  Its possible there is issue in this driver under xen...  But you can clearly see the problem from the sniffs.. You need to investigate that..  Can you sniff on the physical interface to your xen host to see if your actually seeing the traffic pfsense says it put on the wire?

                                        An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                                        If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                                        Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                                        SG-4860 24.11 | Lab VMs 2.7.2, 24.11

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                                        • D
                                          Douglas Haber
                                          last edited by

                                          @johnpoz:

                                          I didn't mean to say it was a WAN connection problem - what I meant is that pfsenes is putting it on its wan interface - and for some reason wan device is not seeing it.  Your pfsense is VM..  It seems to me you got a problem in that system on the wan side..

                                          Again –- from pfsense point of view all the packets it sees on its wan interface are being forwarded to lan, the lan answer and those are sent out its wan..  If you clearly have an issue between the wan guy requesting the data and where its being requested from.

                                          But from your sniff pfsense was doing what it was suppose to do..  Its possible there is issue in this driver under xen...  But you can clearly see the problem from the sniffs.. You need to investigate that..  Can you sniff on the physical interface to your xen host to see if your actually seeing the traffic pfsense says it put on the wire?

                                          I sure can. I will do so. Just need to figure out how to get the brand new citrix repo's working as they are not yet. :)

                                          In order to work with you and others, do I need to capture the LAN side as well, for the trio of items? Hypervisor/pfSense/web VM?

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                                          • johnpozJ
                                            johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
                                            last edited by

                                            In a perfect world trying to track this down.. I wold sniff at the physical interface of your host, on both pfsense interfaces and then at the VM interface.

                                            This gives us full path..  And allows us to validate that inbound packets are getting all the way to the vm client behind pfsense - it answers and then pfsense sends that back and it goes out the physical interface of the hypervisor host..

                                            An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                                            If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                                            Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                                            SG-4860 24.11 | Lab VMs 2.7.2, 24.11

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