Need help gigabit performance

[stephenw10]

@Pitbully:

When you say baremetal I assume you are talking build out of the box…

I mean install and run pfSense on the hardware directly rather than in VMware as a test. You could potentially do that running from a USB stick for example. That would prove the hardware compatibility.

I would expect to get 800Mbps through that box easily. It looks like some VMware issue you're hitting there. Even with the overhead introduced running virtually you should see more than 300Mbps.

Do you have open-vm-tools installed? https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Open_VM_Tools_package

Steve

[Pitbully]

Thanks for taking the time out to help.  I just put my modem back into gateway mode and here are the results. I wasnt connected directly to it but through a nortel 4548 1gig switch.  I will try to run from usb give me a few to set it up.  The only tools I installed was the open-vm-tools.

[Pitbully]

Well its something within the VM that I am doing wrong.  USB pfsense speeds below, should I bother running it in a VM?

[SammyWoo]

To me VM should only for testing, once you are in production, should run on a dedicated, or "bare metal" as he says.

[Pitbully]

Thanks, I thought I would be able to run this box in a VM as its for home only not in production.

[stephenw10]

I would not expect the hypervisor overhead to make that much difference normally. It looks like you could probably tune that better. You might want to ask in the virtualisation section.

Steve

[A Former User]

What Ethernet cards are you using in your VM?
Are you using Virtualised ones? vmxnet3 in Vmware or VirtIO in KVM?
Have you turned off all hardware offload?

Tim

[Pitbully]

I had the offload checked.  I was using the e1000 nics and the ethernet cards and its a C2000 SoC I354 Quad GbE Controller.  From the supermicro 5014 board from http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/atom/x10/a1sri-2758f.cfm

[dmurphynj]

I have a similar setup and you should have no problem pushing that kind of traffic ….

WAN provider: Verizon FiOS (Gigabit symmetric)
System: Supermicro SYS-5018A-TN7B (A1SRM-LN7F-2758 system board)
Interfaces:
  WAN - ix driver/ Port 1 on an Intel X520 (10gb) PCI3 board with 1gb SFP+ installed
  LAN - ix driver/ Port 2 on the same Intel X520 (10gb) PCIe board with 1gb SFP+ installed
  OPT1GUEST - igb driver/ gigabit port on the SuperMicro built-on i350-AM2 controller (guest VLAN)
Installation: Bare metal
System drives: Pair of SanDisk SSD Plus SDSSDA-120G drives; using a zpool mirror configuration.

The performance is excellent.  Absolutely excellent; zero concerns here.

I did add 3 system tunables for the X520 card:

kern.ipc.nmbclusters=9168192
kern.ipc.nmbjumbop=524288
hw.intr_storm_threshold=10000

But otherwise, things are running very well out of the box.  See attached speedtest.


[Pitbully]

Baremetal
There is just too much overhead on the VM I assume.  Thats too bad, but glad I didnt have to buy another box.  Now I am going to install some packages on here.

Thanks everyone!

[giagl011]

https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=145162.0

Is the above the same problem?  VM overhead?

[stephenw10]

No probably not. The overhead from running virtual should not be that large if the hypervisor is setup correctly. And on your hardware you shouldn't be getting even close to any limit at 180Mbps. Assuming you meant bps.

Steve