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    Poor performance on igb driver

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    • stephenw10S
      stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
      last edited by

      Sorry I meant where are you testing between? Speedtest client on igb1 connecting to a server via igb0?

      Steve

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      • B
        bdaniel7 @stephenw10
        last edited by

        @stephenw10
        Yes, the mediaconverter is connected to igb0, my Windows 10 client is connected to the igb1 port.

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        • stephenw10S
          stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
          last edited by

          I don't see it having been asked so, are you connecting using PPPoE?

          Steve

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          • B
            bdaniel7 @stephenw10
            last edited by

            @stephenw10
            Yes, I'm using PPPoE.

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            • stephenw10S
              stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
              last edited by

              Ah, then that is the cause of the problem. You can see that all the loading is on one queue and hence one CPU core while the others are mostly idle. It's unfortunately a known issue with PPPoE in FreeBSD/pfSense right now.
              https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=203856

              However there is something you can do to mitigate it to some extent, set:
              sysctl net.isr.dispatch=deferred

              You can add that as a system tunable in System > Advanced if it makes a significant difference.

              Be aware that doing so may negatively impact some other things, ALTQ traffic shaping in particular.

              Steve

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              • B
                bdaniel7
                last edited by

                Thank you for the clarification.
                I should've stated from the beginning that I'm on PPPoE.
                I added the net.isr.dispatch setting, but I don't have any improvements in speed.

                I am now evaluating which option is cheaper and faster, buying a different board, with other (Intel) cards and keeping pfSense, or moving to Linux.

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                • B
                  bdaniel7
                  last edited by

                  These are my settings, by the way:

                  hw.igb.fc_setting=0
                  hw.igb.rxd="4096"
                  hw.igb.txd="4096"
                  net.link.ifqmaxlen="8192"
                  hw.igb.max_interrupt_rate="64000"
                  hw.igb.rx_process_limit="-1"
                  hw.igb.tx_process_limit="-1"
                  hw.igb.0.fc=0
                  hw.igb.1.fc=0
                  net.isr.defaultqlimit=4096
                  net.isr.dispatch=deferred
                  net.pf.states_hashsize="2097152"
                  net.pf.source_nodes_hashsize="65536"
                  hw.igb.enable_msix: 1
                  hw.igb.enable_aim: 1

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                  • stephenw10S
                    stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                    last edited by

                    Hmm, you should see some improvement in speed with that setting. You may need to restart the ppp session or at least clear the firewall state. Or reboot if it's being applied by system tunables.

                    Steve

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                    • B
                      bblacey @bdaniel7
                      last edited by

                      @bdaniel7 said in Poor performance on igb driver:

                      These are my settings, by the way:

                      hw.igb.fc_setting=0
                      hw.igb.rxd="4096"
                      hw.igb.txd="4096"
                      net.link.ifqmaxlen="8192"
                      hw.igb.max_interrupt_rate="64000"
                      hw.igb.rx_process_limit="-1"
                      hw.igb.tx_process_limit="-1"
                      hw.igb.0.fc=0
                      hw.igb.1.fc=0
                      net.isr.defaultqlimit=4096
                      net.isr.dispatch=deferred
                      net.pf.states_hashsize="2097152"
                      net.pf.source_nodes_hashsize="65536"
                      hw.igb.enable_msix: 1
                      hw.igb.enable_aim: 1

                      I recently went through the process if identifying the performance culprit on the Intel NICs using a Lanner FW-7525A. It turns out, that for the igb driver, you want hw.igb.enable_msix=0 or hw.pci.enable_msix=0 to nudge the driver towards using msi interrupts over the less-performant MSIX interrupts (suggested here). This made a 4x difference on my system. It is also recommended to disable tso and lso on the igb drivers so include net.inet.tcp.tso=0 as well. Hope this helps.

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                      • stephenw10S
                        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                        last edited by

                        Hmm, interesting. I wouldn't have expected msi to any better than msix.
                        What sort of figures did you see?

                        Steve

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                        • B
                          bblacey @stephenw10
                          last edited by

                          @stephenw10 said in Poor performance on igb driver:

                          Hmm, interesting. I wouldn't have expected msi to any better than msix.
                          What sort of figures did you see?

                          Steve

                          Hmmm, I'm back to msix interrupts so that was a red herring. I'm able to fully saturate my 400/20 link (achieve 470/24) with both inbound and outbound firewall rules enabled. Here is my current config that seems to achieve this:

                          [2.4.4-RELEASE][root@firewall.home]/root: cat /boot/loader.conf 
kern.cam.boot_delay=10000
# Tune the igb driver
hw.igb.rx_process_limit=800  #100
hw.igb.rxd=4096  #default 1024
hw.igb.txd=4096  #default 1024
# Disable msix interrupts on igb driver either via hw.pci or the narrower hw.igb
#hw.pci.enable_msix=0   #default 1 (enabled, disable to nudge to msi interrupts)
#hw.igb.enable_msix=0
#net.inet.tcp.tso=0  #confirmed redundant with disable in GUI
#hw.igb.fc_setting=0
legal.intel_ipw.license_ack=1
legal.intel_iwi.license_ack=1
boot_multicons="YES"
boot_serial="YES"
console="comconsole,vidconsole"
comconsole_speed="115200"
autoboot_delay="3"
hw.usb.no_pf="1"

                          Basically, I'm using the defaults other than increasing the igb driver rx_process_limit, rxd and txd. I have disabled tso, lro and checksum offloading via the gui under System->Advanced->Networking (checked means disabled) and set kern.ipc.nmbclusters to 262144 under System->Advanced->Tunables.

                          Hardware:

                          CPU: Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU  C2358  @ 1.74GHz (1750.04-MHz K8-class CPU)
  Origin="GenuineIntel"  Id=0x406d8  Family=0x6  Model=0x4d  Stepping=8
  Features=0xbfebfbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CLFLUSH,DTS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE>
  Features2=0x43d8e3bf<SSE3,PCLMULQDQ,DTES64,MON,DS_CPL,VMX,EST,TM2,SSSE3,CX16,xTPR,PDCM,SSE4.1,SSE4.2,MOVBE,POPCNT,TSCDLT,AESNI,RDRAND>
  AMD Features=0x28100800<SYSCALL,NX,RDTSCP,LM>
  AMD Features2=0x101<LAHF,Prefetch>
  Structured Extended Features=0x2282<TSCADJ,SMEP,ERMS,NFPUSG>
  VT-x: PAT,HLT,MTF,PAUSE,EPT,UG,VPID
  TSC: P-state invariant, performance statistics

                          You might want to go back to the pfSense defaults and enable all networking offloading options are disabled (checked in the GUI), then tweak the igb driver elements as I did above test and then adjust key tunables such as kern.ipc.nmbclusters but more isn't necessarily better.

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                          • M
                            MarcoP
                            last edited by

                            I've just noticed you are on PPPoE, would increasing MSS clamping on the interface or setting MTU at 1492 help.

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                            • stephenw10S
                              stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                              last edited by

                              You should put custom settings in /boot/loader.conf.local to avoid them being overwritten at upgrade. Create that file if it's not there.

                              Steve

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                              • N
                                Nonconformist
                                last edited by

                                Hi @bdaniel7, any luck on achieving gigabit speeds after your tweaks? I’ve been running into the same issues as you with the same Qotom box.

                                Posted about it [here] (https://forum.netgate.com/topic/137196/slow-gigabit-download-on-a-quadcore-intel-celeron-j1900-2-41ghz), and then used the tweaks in this thread.

                                Still getting only about 730mbps on wired. 😐

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                                • B
                                  bdaniel7 @Nonconformist
                                  last edited by

                                  @nonconformist
                                  Hi, nope, I couldn't get any speed higher than 550 Mbps when I tried the tweaks.
                                  Then I abandoned the subject, due to lack of time.

                                  I will try the tweaks from the article you posted.

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                                  • M
                                    MarcoP
                                    last edited by

                                    any dropped packets?

                                    netstat -ihw 1

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                                    • M
                                      MarcoP
                                      last edited by MarcoP

                                      Since you have cores waiting, you could try to avoid locks when switching between them with:
                                      net.isr.bindthreads="1"

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                                      • N
                                        Nonconformist @MarcoP
                                        last edited by Nonconformist

                                        @marcop Couldn't check through the week so doing this over the weekend. Long story short, no dropped packets.

                                        net.isr.bindthreads="1"

                                        actually brought the download/upload speeds down to 680/800 from 740/934.

                                        Reading more about this, it's beginning to look like achieving 1G download isn't possible with the igb0 driver with a PPPoE WAN connection.

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                                        • stephenw10S
                                          stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                                          last edited by

                                          Are you guys actually running at 2.4GHz? I asked about cpu freq values earlier and there were none and looking back it appears to be running at 2GHz.

                                          If that's true then you need to enable speedstep in the BIOS and make sure it's loading.
                                          You should see some values reported by:
                                          sysctl dev.cpu.0.freq_levels

                                          Steve

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                                          • stephenw10S
                                            stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                                            last edited by

                                            The dashboard should show:

                                            Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU J1900 @ 1.99GHz
Current: 1992 MHz, Max: 1993 MHz
4 CPUs: 1 package(s) x 4 core(s)
AES-NI CPU Crypto: No

                                            Sysctl something like:

                                            dev.cpu.0.freq_levels: 1993/2000 1992/2000 1909/1825 1826/1650 1743/1475 1660/1300 1577/1125 1494/950 1411/775 1328/600

                                            Otherwise you're seeing a 20% performance reduction.

                                            Steve

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