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    PfSense 16k Jumbo frames support?

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
    17 Posts 8 Posters 6.3k Views
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    • W
      Wolf666
      last edited by

      …. and what is your media server? What are your server spec (cpu, ram), what is your internet upload bandwidth.
      If you need to transcode, again jumbo is not the solution.

      Modem Draytek Vigor 130
      pfSense 2.4 Supermicro A1SRi-2558 - 8GB ECC RAM - Intel S3500 SSD 80GB - M350 Case
      Switch Cisco SG350-10
      AP Netgear R7000 (Stock FW)
      HTPC Intel NUC5i3RYH
      NAS Synology DS1515+
      NAS Synology DS213+

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      • G
        GomezAddams
        last edited by

        @johnpoz:

        jumbo is pointless..  What is your issue with your video streaming?  Normal 1500 lan mtu is more than capable of pushing large data rates.. I see 100MBps from my storage VM with cheap hardware, what video are you trying that bitrate would require more than that?

        If your having issues with streaming video I would look to your actual problem not thinking you can fix with jumbo.

        Jumbo frames were introduced with gigabit ethernet. I've heard rumors that there were vendors who back-fitted jumbo frames into their 100mb gear, but in all my years of networking, I've never seen it used.

        Most people don't bother with jumbo frames for general networking. Jumbo frames really come into play in the iSCSI world. They are pretty much de rigueur in that world to keep a perceived parity with fibre-channel's larger packet size.

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        • W
          Wolf666
          last edited by

          Nice reading: http://etherealmind.com/ethernet-jumbo-frames-full-duplex-9000-bytes/
          http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2011/01/24/jumbo-frames-comparison-testing-with-ip-storage-and-vmotion/

          Modem Draytek Vigor 130
          pfSense 2.4 Supermicro A1SRi-2558 - 8GB ECC RAM - Intel S3500 SSD 80GB - M350 Case
          Switch Cisco SG350-10
          AP Netgear R7000 (Stock FW)
          HTPC Intel NUC5i3RYH
          NAS Synology DS1515+
          NAS Synology DS213+

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          • G
            GomezAddams
            last edited by

            @Wolf666:

            Nice reading: http://etherealmind.com/ethernet-jumbo-frames-full-duplex-9000-bytes/
            http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2011/01/24/jumbo-frames-comparison-testing-with-ip-storage-and-vmotion/

            I'd be skeptical about everything you read pertaining to jumbo frames using "lab" tests. In the first link referenced above, the author concludes that there is little gain when he uses jumbo frames. As a commentor points out, the author is probably using a disk array with few spindles and the bottleneck is going to be disk, not network.

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            • H
              Harvy66
              last edited by

              For modern networks, jumbo frames do little to increase network performance, but they can help with SAN performance because sending 3 packets of 1500bytes each for full-fill a single 4KB block kind of sucks. If anything, fewer spindles brings out this problem even more than many spindles because of the increased IOP workload.

              It also means that during writes, the SAN only gets fractional blocks at a time. If the SAN doesn't buffer then write out the data, it could be doing 3+ iops per block being written, also unaligned block writes.

              Jumbo frames are great for SANs, but not much help for anything else.

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              • johnpozJ
                johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
                last edited by

                I find it highly unlikely the OP is using a SAN to pull his video off of ;)

                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 2.8, 24.11

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                • C
                  cmb
                  last edited by

                  @RBT-RS:

                  However, pfSense only allows a max of 9000k – Which is even below the 9k frame size of my PC, which is 9012k.

                  9000 MTU = 9014 frame size.

                  @RBT-RS:

                  Can I increase the MTU limit?

                  No, since your switch doesn't support anything bigger. Your firewall's NIC probably doesn't either. Most desktop NICs don't either.

                  Going from 1500 to 9000 isn't likely to change anything in regards to local streaming, much less going beyond 9000. You also don't need to have the firewall match the LAN hosts in that scenario, as nothing > 1500 is going to come in via the Internet (and it sounds like you aren't routing internally).

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                  • ?
                    Guest
                    last edited by

                    Hello together,

                    My PC (frame size 16128) –> Netgear Prosafe GS108E switch (unmanaged) --> Nokia IP390 Firewall (pfSense) --> The internet

                    Using Jumbo frames means that all in the chain integrated devices must and not should be also able
                    to support the same great or size of jumbo frames! Thats means in short, if all devices 9k frames, go
                    and use them on all devices, and only then you will be benefit from this option!

                    However, pfSense only allows a max of 9000k – Which is even below the 9k frame size of my PC, which is 9012k.

                    9k is sufficient, and please read above all devices in that chain such as you are describing must support
                    the same size of jumbo frames, otherwise it is useless and does not effect anything.

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                    • johnpozJ
                      johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
                      last edited by

                      "otherwise it is useless and does not effect anything."

                      Not really true - if his switch doesn't support it will break lots of shit ;)

                      For no real reason..  The OP has stated he is trying to get his 4k movies not to buffer, we have no idea for how long this is - maybe its 3 seconds.. We have no idea of he is transcoding on the fly or just accessing a file from a share be it smb or nfs.  He could prob have a huge improvement just moving to smb3 over smb2 in moving files across his network.

                      Changing your network to jumbo to help your videos load faster is not the right path, unless your pulling these files off a storage network using iscsi maybe?

                      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 2.8, 24.11

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                      • H
                        Harvy66
                        last edited by

                        I can watch 4K videos from YouTube over my 100Mb Internet connection, no buffering. The initial start of  the video has a hair bit of hesitation, like 1-3 seconds, but once the video is playing, I can jump to non-buffered parts of the timeline and it starts playing in less than 1 second.

                        4K UHD Bluray is 82Mb/s-128Mb/s. Jumbo-frames is not going to fix your 1,000Mb/s network not being able to handle 128Mb/s. Find the real bottleneck. It's probably the protocol being used to remotely stream the file. If  you're using a web client, maybe your web service needs to have its IO buffers, network buffers, or caches tweaked.

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