High CPU load, after reboot, 1 NIC missing

creepwood · Oct 29, 2016, 5:51 PM

I was having a pretty slow experience on my 100/100Mbit connection. Checked my pfsense dashboard and the CPU load was pretty high, fluctuating between 30 - 90% but mostly in the high end of the spectra. I shut down all the traffic essentially to see what would happen and it still kept being busy. Not very savvy when it comes to troubleshooting network traffic I just rebooted the machine to see if that would solve anything.

It didn't go very well, when it came back the WAN NIC was missing so the setup for setting up the network again popped up. I'm at loss right now.

I find it strange that my connection worked although sluggish but a reboot messed it up? Sadly I don't have a NIC to exchange it with right now so I can't really troubleshoot the NIC.

What could have caused the high CPU load? Could the CPU somehow compensate for a failing NIC and that's the reason for the high CPU load?

The graph that tells you in/out traffic, it was in the 20k/sec before I rebooted, could I have been under attack and that's the reason for the high cpu load?

W4RH34D · Oct 29, 2016, 6:22 PM

I wouldn't say it was compensating but probably going through a ton of CRC checks from an insane amount of resends for a bad signal from a nic dying out.

Maybe you took a surge.

creepwood · Oct 30, 2016, 9:24 AM

Thank you for your reply.

I turned it all of and hooked up one of my consumer routers until I got it fixed. After a while I started making a reinstall on a different medium just to troubleshoot a little more and all of a sudden, the NIC shows up again. I installed it on a CF card this time with an internal (PCI) CF reader hooked to an internal USB. It's been up an running all night (12h now) with heavy traffic and the CPU load is just a couple of percent.

So initially it doesn't seem like the NIC is broken (I'm ashamed to say it's a really cheap TP Link NIC but I couldn't afford something else at the time)

I'm still a little concerned what made it act that way.

W4RH34D · Oct 30, 2016, 2:49 PM

What's the hardware you're using? The more details you give makes it easier to surmise the situation.

With nothing to go on I usually first start looking at electrical issues especially if the unit had been solid for some time.

creepwood · Oct 30, 2016, 4:05 PM

I should really put that in a signature oh something like that.

I'm using a AMD A6-6400K APU with an extra TP-link NIC (realtec) and 2x4GB RAM (It's what I had laying around that would take up a midi tower place.