*RANT* Why pfsense is popular
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In my quest to increase my networking knowledge and to have control of my own equipment, I had decided to remove my Google Fiber network box from my network and decided with a single box solution. Yes you can guy a managed switch like the edge router and stick a consumer router behind it (this is a need of having GFiber as you have to set your WAN to VLAN 2 with a 802.11q bit of 3) and be done with it. But after reading and watching many many youtube videos about rolling your own router and most of them were about pfsense, I then focused my video watching to pfsense related videos.
First I bought a cheap Chinese pos intel j1900 cpu based mini pc, works ok so long as your wan connection is under 300Mbps. So then I decided to build my own small form factor pc. THe heart of this beast would be an AMD FM2+ A10-8750 cpu on a A88X based mini itx board. Along with a 4 port intel nic this box chews up 1Gbps and spits it back out. I have zero issues when it comes to "normal" data traffic.
RANT part
But the the life of me this OS is crap for gamers, online gamers (atleast with WOW). If my GFiber box is the router, WOW as a constant 70-80 ms lag, with pfsense 300-1500 ms lag. And I have tried having port forwarding on and off with no difference. Now I can live with 300ms lag but anything over 500ms is painful. So i decided to try a few other firewall/router x64 solutions, mostly linux based. And now I know why pfsense is so popular, most everything out there is dog sh*t. I had seen few posts about gamers using UNTANGLED of pfsense as they felt UT didn't introduce the lag that pfsense does as using the same HW they had way lower lag with UT over pfsense. SO i decided to try UT. This would have need a good solution and seems to be one of the best solutions using linux but you can't set the 802.11q bit for the damn VLAN. Is this only a featuyre in FreeBSD based firewall/router based solutions or just a lack of intelligence of the linux firewall developers??????
I'm at a loss of ideas to run with my own router build. Pfsense is a good solutions of most but not online gamers.
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Sorry but you did not provide any context or asked for help. Ranting or venting doesn't help anyone. Most of us are gamers and latency is not an issue. If you have latency issues check your hardware, cables, ISP and so on.
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"with pfsense 300-1500 ms lag."
If your seeing this sort of lag that you are blaming on pfsense you got something else wrong… Sorry but that is just not the case... There is nothing pfsense would be doing that would introduce such extra lag..
Please show you work and setup that brings you to the conclusion that pfsense is the cause of your lag..
Something as simple as http://www.azurespeed.com/ even.. Lets see those numbers with and without pfsense.
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Stop building castles in swamps, pfSense being the castle and the swamp being your hardware.
I'm getting 0.008ms through pfSense. I let bittorrent run 24/7 and don't have any issues with latency. Here's my quality graph against 4.2.2.2
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Sorry but you did not provide any context or asked for help. Ranting or venting doesn't help anyone. Most of us are gamers and latency is not an issue. If you have latency issues check your hardware, cables, ISP and so on.
That's kind of the point of it being a RANT do you know many RANTS that are useful or helpfully? That being said…..
All the hardware is the same minus the pfsense box and the Google Fiber box, cables everything else is the same .
AS for the Current hardware:
AMD A10-5800B FM2
GIGABYTE GA-F2A88XN-WIFI FM2+/FM2 A88X with the lastest BIOS F6
8 GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 @ 1600Mhz
INTEL PRO/1000 VT PCIe NIC 4-PORT GIGABIT SERVER ADAPTER EXPI9404VT YT674
60GB OCZ SSDISP is Google fiber and it is a PITA being able to remove the box from the network as the WAN has to be VLAN 2 tagged and the priority bit set to 3 which is done easily in pfsense. And may infact be the issue but I doubt that as I can goto any speed test site:
http://beta.speedtest.net
http://speedtest.googlefiber.net/
http://www.dslreports.com/speedtestand all the speed test are within 50Mbps of each other both with the GFiber box and the pfsense box. and the pings form each site range from 4-6 ms.
My normal day to day data traffic flows with no hiccups with either box. Streaming movies (netflix, hulu, amazon) livetv (sling), youtube, pandora and that runs fine with either box. When I try to play WoW, on the GF box 78ms, nothing more nothing less. PF normal is 300-600 ms. this is with a vanilla install, and I have tried using port forwarding for the WOW server/ports doesn't not matter if they are on or off.
Also pfsense doesn't grab the dhcpv6 info that the GF box does and this seem to be an issue that all GF users have.
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for me pfsense lowered latency not increased it.
Most consumer routers run of very weak atom type chips, whilst my units have more than 20X cpu power available over such units.
I got no idea what went wrong for you, but I disagree its "pfsense to blame" as such, might be something that needs configuring to be fully compatible with your isp.
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The only complaints I've seen regularly are about static ports with outbound NAT.
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"with pfsense 300-1500 ms lag."
If your seeing this sort of lag that you are blaming on pfsense you got something else wrong… Sorry but that is just not the case... There is nothing pfsense would be doing that would introduce such extra lag..
Please show you work and setup that brings you to the conclusion that pfsense is the cause of your lag..
Something as simple as http://www.azurespeed.com/ even.. Lets see those numbers with and without pfsense.
Sorry but I have seen post where ppl have had some bad lag on a pfsense box and install untangled on the same hardware and lost all the lag. Not saying its normal, just saying that is is possible. And I would try to remove pfsense as the variable in this case but unfortunately UT does have the ability to set the 802.11q bit to 3 and confirmed by one of their engineers who has submitted a feature request ticket.
You can read the post above to see the hardware used in my pfsense box and removed as many of the variables as I could.
Currently using the GFiber box and my in game latency is sitting at 78ms as it always is.
First Pic is GF the 2nd Pic is PFsense
Right after I switch the data feed from GF to PF I reload azurespeed and WOW, wow is now at 79ms, which is awesome.
Shutting down the wow client and then restarting wow its jumped back up to 200+ms
after about 5 minus is came back down to 100ms, this is not normal as I have raided for hrs and it never came down form 500+ ms lag.I can live with 100ms, my issue is I have seen it go as high as 2500ms and as low as 35ms (last night while raiding) with no real explanation.
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for me pfsense lowered latency not increased it.
Most consumer routers run of very weak atom type chips, whilst my units have more than 20X cpu power available over such units.
I got no idea what went wrong for you, but I disagree its "pfsense to blame" as such, might be something that needs configuring to be fully compatible with your isp.
I really can't run a consumer router other then in bridged mode and then I might as well just have a switch and a wifi woth POE along with either the GFiber box or pfsense.
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Stop building castles in swamps, pfSense being the castle and the swamp being your hardware.
I'm getting 0.008ms through pfSense. I let bittorrent run 24/7 and don't have any issues with latency. Here's my quality graph against 4.2.2.2
Yeah i doubt my hardware is the swamp you can read the specs above. Are you using a beta version of PFsense cuz it shows my is the latest version:
2.4.2-RELEASE-p1 (amd64)
built on Tue Dec 12 13:45:26 CST 2017
FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE-p6Can provide me the info to get those graph and chart I do not see them in the dashboard widgets.
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If you have gateway monitoring on WAN (the default setting), the system is automatically keeping track of two pings per second in Status > Monitoring.
From there select settings, change the left axis to Quality / WANGW (or the local equivalent).
A good place to start with Options: 8 hours, Resolution: 1 minute.
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If you have gateway monitoring on WAN (the default setting), the system is automatically keeping track of two pings per second in Status > Monitoring.
From there select settings, change the left axis to Quality / WANGW (or the local equivalent).
A good place to start with Options: 8 hours, Resolution: 1 minute.
Thank you for the help on setting that up, also playing wow now to see if that could help capture any packet drops or issues :D ;D
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I do not see any difference between your tests with your GF and pfsense.. And that azure test.. Where are those 300-1500 numbers your talking about?
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I do not see any difference between your tests with your GF and pfsense.. And that azure test.. Where are those 300-1500 numbers your talking about?
In World of Warcraft. Like I said my normal day to day traffic is rock solid.
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And how exactly do you think pfsense can tell the difference between these packets.. And slow down the wow ones? PFM? Because pfsense/netgate hate wow players? ;)
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And how exactly do you think pfsense can tell the difference between these packets.. And slow down the wow ones? PFM? Because pfsense/netgate hate wow players? ;)
Well its obvious they do, seriously ….... Hence why it was a RANT, its doesn't make sense. General networking would suggest that there were a a large % of dropped packets while gaming, which I have not seen. Maybe I did something wrong, but its is pretty much a vanilla install and the 3rd clean install, after trying port forwarding and traffic shaping.
I did game a bit last nite and upon logging it it jumped to 300+ms lag. Leaving the game running I moved the cables to the GFiber box, relogged into wow of a few mins add lag was as always 78ms, then switched the cables back to pfsense and relogged and then they stayed at 78ms for the rest of the nite, thoughts?
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And how exactly do you think pfsense can tell the difference between these packets.. And slow down the wow ones? PFM? Because pfsense/netgate hate wow players? ;)
Well its obvious they do, seriously ….... Hence why it was a RANT, its doesn't make sense. General networking would suggest that there were a a large % of dropped packets while gaming, which I have not seen. Maybe I did something wrong, but its is pretty much a vanilla install and the 3rd clean install, after trying port forwarding and traffic shaping.
I did game a bit last nite and upon logging it it jumped to 300+ms lag. Leaving the game running I moved the cables to the GFiber box, relogged into wow of a few mins add lag was as always 78ms, then switched the cables back to pfsense and relogged and then they stayed at 78ms for the rest of the nite, thoughts?
My thoughts are its a compatibility issue, it might be a specific vlan id or something needs setting to get the right performance from the ISP.
e.g.in the UK on openreach VDSL, there is multiple vlan's used to classify traffic priority, some are only supposed to be used for IPTV customers and can have unpredictable results on other types of network usage, I expect your google supplied box is preconfigured correctly and you need to research and get the information to get it all setup right on pfsense.
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And how exactly do you think pfsense can tell the difference between these packets.. And slow down the wow ones? PFM? Because pfsense/netgate hate wow players? ;)
Well its obvious they do, seriously ….... Hence why it was a RANT, its doesn't make sense. General networking would suggest that there were a a large % of dropped packets while gaming, which I have not seen. Maybe I did something wrong, but its is pretty much a vanilla install and the 3rd clean install, after trying port forwarding and traffic shaping.
I did game a bit last nite and upon logging it it jumped to 300+ms lag. Leaving the game running I moved the cables to the GFiber box, relogged into wow of a few mins add lag was as always 78ms, then switched the cables back to pfsense and relogged and then they stayed at 78ms for the rest of the nite, thoughts?
My thoughts are its a compatibility issue, it might be a specific vlan id or something needs setting to get the right performance from the ISP.
e.g.in the UK on openreach VDSL, there is multiple vlan's used to classify traffic priority, some are only supposed to be used for IPTV customers and can have unpredictable results on other types of network usage, I expect your google supplied box is preconfigured correctly and you need to research and get the information to get it all setup right on pfsense.
I'm not ruling that out, but I have done the research, this projects is a good 6-8 mos in planning and readin google, level1techs and pfsense forums. What I have gleened from the data is that WAN has to be configured for VLAN 2 with the 802.11q bit priority set to 3, to get the internet traffic flowing and it does I hit my normal speed test at 900Mbps on all the major speed test sites so I know its configured for internet data, versus IPTV and VOIP.
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other ideas (without commands sorry as I been up all night).best to try these step by step one at a time, and retest in each step.
Disable energy efficient ethernet.
Disable (at least temporarily checksum offloading on the NIC).
Reduce network queues to 1, this to make sure no packet ordering issues causing problems or driver bugs.
Disable TSO/RSO if enabled.
Disable interrupt moderation on NIC if enabled.
If powerd is enabled set to the performance mode or disable it.Its unlikely to be a widescale pfsense issue, there would be many complaints if it was, its either a bug that only kicks in a specific scenario which you hitting or a compatibility issue whether it be hardware or isp config.
WOW has a known issue where if nagle is enabled (Delayed acks) it will show high lag because it uses tcp not udp for the game packets. But pfsense as the router doesnt control nagle for client LAN devices, however just in case you can disable nagle on pfsense side via this shell command.
'sysctl net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0'
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What does http://us-looking-glass.battle.net/ show from realm your on to the your IP?
Lets see a sniff of this problem.
So put pfsense behind your GF device in a double nat.. Do you have the problem then vs replacement and the vlan tagging your doing..
Lets see your looking glass traces with your GF and Pfsense and then your untangle - the one thing that would be most likely changing would be your IP.. Are you on the same netblock when you swap out devices.. Your routing could be completely different based upon network your on with google..
if your saying untangle does not have the problem - lets see sniff on untangle wan with it working good, and then sniff on pfsense wan with it bad..
