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    CPU Usage when network used

    Problems Installing or Upgrading pfSense Software
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    • Q
      qwaven
      last edited by

      tried the dispatch
      sysctl net.isr.dispatch
      net.isr.dispatch: deferred

      cpu seemed to about 50% utilization.

      interrupt total rate
      cpu0:timer 122117 254
      cpu2:timer 121707 253
      cpu3:timer 116674 243
      cpu1:timer 115728 241
      irq256: ahci0 11720 24
      irq257: xhci0 2850 6
      irq258: hdac0 2 0
      irq260: t5nex0:evt 2 0
      irq269: igb0:que 0 659069 1372
      irq270: igb0:que 1 1457 3
      irq271: igb0:que 2 516 1
      irq272: igb0:que 3 515 1
      irq273: igb0:link 3 0
      irq274: pcib5 1 0
      irq280: pcib6 1 0
      irq286: pcib7 1 0
      irq287: igb3:que 0 453042 943
      irq288: igb3:que 1 573830 1194
      irq289: igb3:que 2 755133 1572
      irq290: igb3:que 3 438318 912
      irq291: igb3:link 3 0
      irq292: pcib8 1 0
      Total 3372690 7020

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Q
        qwaven
        last edited by

        Also now tried disabling ntop cpu usage looks to be maybe 8-10% less.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • stephenw10S
          stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
          last edited by

          Is that total CPU was 50%? Did throughput increase?

          Steve

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Q
            qwaven
            last edited by

            That would be what was shown on the dashboard for cpu performance. If utilization is stuck on 1 core I am not sure if there would be anything else we can do.

            As for throughput, it was about the same but I am not worrying about that as the source for the transfer may impact this as well. Ideally it would be great to see it closer to my actual speed but I'm not sure about testing it reliably.

            Cheers!

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Q
              qwaven
              last edited by

              Hi again,

              I'm assuming we've exhausted trying to improve the cpu utilization with this but I just wanted to say thanks for the help/efforts with this. I am still open to try anything though.

              Cheers!

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • stephenw10S
                stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                last edited by

                I suspect it might be. The single thread performance of that CPU is about equal to that of the Pentium M I used to run and that was good fpr ~650Mbps. At least according to this:
                https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Core2-Duo-E4500-vs-Intel-Pentium-N3700-vs-Intel-Pentium-M-1.73GHz/936vs2513vs1160
                Obviously that's synthetic and there are many variable etc. No PPPoE overhead in that test either.
                The E4500 can pass Gigabit, just. (at full size TCP packets...many variables etc!).

                If that is to be believed then it probably is running burst mode and I'm not sure there's much we can do before RSS is re-written in FreeBSD to allow multiple cores.

                You probably could see better performance off-loading the PPPoE to another device. That would probably mean a double NAT scenario unfortunately.

                Steve

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                • Q
                  qwaven
                  last edited by

                  Hi Steve,

                  It's unfortunate about this RSS issue. I have another board that I plan to try out, however its quite overkill especially if only 1 core is going to be used for pppoe. However it does have some better on board hardware that may help overall. It is however still just 2ghz/core.

                  https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/atom/A2SDi-H-TP4F.cfm

                  Cheers!

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • stephenw10S
                    stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                    last edited by

                    Yes. I have a PPPoE WAN but fortunately/unfortunately it's no where near fast enough to worry about this. 😉

                    No benchmarks for the C3958 but if we assume it's the same as the C3858 but with 4 more cores then it should make about ~40% better single thread performance.

                    It does seem like a waste of cores unless you virtualise it.

                    Steve

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • Q
                      qwaven
                      last edited by

                      Hi Steve,

                      So I flipped it over. Performance so far looks drastically better. CPU in the gui was about 5-6% while transferring over pppoe. I believe still just the 1 core.

                      PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND
                      11 root 155 ki31 0K 256K CPU1 1 7:39 97.26% [idle{idle: cpu1}]
                      11 root 155 ki31 0K 256K CPU10 10 7:41 97.12% [idle{idle: cpu10}]
                      11 root 155 ki31 0K 256K CPU13 13 7:33 96.96% [idle{idle: cpu13}]
                      11 root 155 ki31 0K 256K CPU7 7 7:45 96.85% [idle{idle: cpu7}]
                      11 root 155 ki31 0K 256K CPU11 11 7:38 96.51% [idle{idle: cpu11}]
                      11 root 155 ki31 0K 256K RUN 4 7:43 96.46% [idle{idle: cpu4}]
                      11 root 155 ki31 0K 256K CPU3 3 7:44 96.46% [idle{idle: cpu3}]
                      11 root 155 ki31 0K 256K CPU9 9 7:36 96.26% [idle{idle: cpu9}]
                      11 root 155 ki31 0K 256K CPU5 5 7:42 95.99% [idle{idle: cpu5}]
                      11 root 155 ki31 0K 256K RUN 8 7:19 95.56% [idle{idle: cpu8}]
                      11 root 155 ki31 0K 256K CPU6 6 7:42 95.12% [idle{idle: cpu6}]
                      11 root 155 ki31 0K 256K CPU2 2 7:42 94.98% [idle{idle: cpu2}]
                      11 root 155 ki31 0K 256K CPU12 12 7:40 93.93% [idle{idle: cpu12}]
                      11 root 155 ki31 0K 256K RUN 15 7:35 87.04% [idle{idle: cpu15}]
                      11 root 155 ki31 0K 256K CPU14 14 7:31 82.95% [idle{idle: cpu14}]
                      11 root 155 ki31 0K 256K RUN 0 7:24 79.60% [idle{idle: cpu0}]

                      irq298: ix0:q0 2716423 6058
                      irq299: ix0:q1 244578 545
                      irq300: ix0:q2 461159 1029
                      irq301: ix0:q3 243416 543
                      irq302: ix0:q4 378891 845
                      irq303: ix0:q5 124788 278
                      irq304: ix0:q6 478729 1068
                      irq305: ix0:q7 125913 281
                      irq306: ix0:link 1 0
                      irq307: ix1:q0 326596 728
                      irq308: ix1:q1 254938 569
                      irq309: ix1:q2 614196 1370
                      irq310: ix1:q3 250402 558
                      irq311: ix1:q4 388996 868
                      irq312: ix1:q5 128709 287
                      irq313: ix1:q6 492403 1098
                      irq314: ix1:q7 130143 290
                      irq315: ix1:link 1 0

                      ix0 is pppoe and ix1 is internal lans.

                      I was thinking about virtualizing. However I've seen so many talks about people suggesting this is not a great choice for a firewall. However I'm open to exploring this more. Do you have any thoughts? Proxmox was my first choice.

                      Cheers!

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • stephenw10S
                        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                        last edited by

                        Nice, what sort of throughput were you seeing at that point?

                        I can't really advise on hypervisors, I'm not using anything right now.

                        A lot of people here are using Proxmox though. ESXi is also popular.

                        Steve

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                        • Q
                          qwaven
                          last edited by

                          Same throughput but I believe this is more because of the source. I have not had a chance to test internally the network to see if anything there is improved. Will update once I have.

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • Q
                            qwaven
                            last edited by

                            so testing with iperf3, I still don't seem to be getting anywhere close to 10G bandwidth.

                            It looks about spot on with 1G.

                            [ 41] 0.00-10.00 sec 56.4 MBytes 47.4 Mbits/sec 3258 sender
                            [ 41] 0.00-10.00 sec 56.4 MBytes 47.3 Mbits/sec receiver
                            [ 43] 0.00-10.00 sec 58.1 MBytes 48.8 Mbits/sec 3683 sender
                            [ 43] 0.00-10.00 sec 58.0 MBytes 48.6 Mbits/sec receiver
                            [SUM] 0.00-10.00 sec 1.10 GBytes 943 Mbits/sec 69930 sender
                            [SUM] 0.00-10.00 sec 1.10 GBytes 941 Mbits/sec receiver

                            Any ideas?

                            This is literally SFP+ 10G interface on pfsense to switch to fileserver. The file server has two 10G bonded links. Nothing else running.

                            Cheers!

                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • stephenw10S
                              stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                              last edited by

                              How many processes are you running there?

                              You have 8 queues so I don't expect to any advantage over 8.

                              Is that result testing over 1G? What do you actually see over 10G?
                              I would anticipate something ~4Gbps maybe. Though if you're running iperf on the firewall it may reduce that.

                              Steve

                              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • Q
                                qwaven
                                last edited by

                                My test with iperf was sending 20 connections (what I saw someones example on the internets doing) and it looks pretty much to saturate if it were 1G.

                                This is not 1G. This is using my internal network. Pfsense reports it as 10G, the switch is all 10G, and the file server has 2x10G.

                                Curious why would iperf on the firewall reduce this?

                                fyi cpu did not appear stressed in any way.

                                Cheers!

                                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                • stephenw10S
                                  stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                                  last edited by

                                  That seems far too much like a 1G link limit to be coincidence.

                                  Check that each part is actually linked at 10G.

                                  Steve

                                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                  • Q
                                    qwaven
                                    last edited by

                                    so on my pfsense I can see all my internal interface vlans are listed with:

                                    media: Ethernet autoselect (10Gbase-T <full-duplex>)

                                    on my NAS I see the bonded interfaces:

                                    Settings for eth4:
                                    Supported ports: [ FIBRE ]
                                    Supported link modes: 1000baseKX/Full
                                    10000baseKR/Full
                                    Supported pause frame use: Symmetric Receive-only
                                    Supports auto-negotiation: No
                                    Advertised link modes: 1000baseKX/Full
                                    10000baseKR/Full
                                    Advertised pause frame use: Symmetric
                                    Advertised auto-negotiation: No
                                    Speed: 10000Mb/s
                                    Duplex: Full
                                    Port: Direct Attach Copper
                                    PHYAD: 0
                                    Transceiver: internal
                                    Auto-negotiation: off
                                    Cannot get wake-on-lan settings: Operation not permitted
                                    Current message level: 0x00000014 (20)
                                    link ifdown
                                    Link detected: yes

                                    Settings for eth5:
                                    Supported ports: [ FIBRE ]
                                    Supported link modes: 1000baseKX/Full
                                    10000baseKR/Full
                                    Supported pause frame use: Symmetric Receive-only
                                    Supports auto-negotiation: No
                                    Advertised link modes: 1000baseKX/Full
                                    10000baseKR/Full
                                    Advertised pause frame use: Symmetric
                                    Advertised auto-negotiation: No
                                    Speed: 10000Mb/s
                                    Duplex: Full
                                    Port: Direct Attach Copper
                                    PHYAD: 0
                                    Transceiver: internal
                                    Auto-negotiation: off
                                    Cannot get wake-on-lan settings: Operation not permitted
                                    Current message level: 0x00000014 (20)
                                    link ifdown
                                    Link detected: yes

                                    On the switch:

                                    0/3 PC Mbr Enable Auto D 10G Full Up Enable Enable Disable (nas)
                                    0/4 PC Mbr Enable Auto D 10G Full Up Enable Enable Disable (nas)
                                    ...
                                    0/16 Enable Auto 10G Full Up Enable Enable Disable (pfsense)

                                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                    • GrimsonG
                                      Grimson Banned
                                      last edited by

                                      Do you use traffic shaping/limiters?

                                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                      • Q
                                        qwaven
                                        last edited by

                                        Unless there is something configured from a default install I have not set anything myself. Going into the traffic shaper area it does not appear to have anything set.

                                        For reference I have dismantled my NAS bonded interfaces and just using 1 interface now. Results are about the same showing about 1G speed.

                                        Thanks!

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                                        • Q
                                          qwaven
                                          last edited by

                                          Update: I have now separated the NAS from the rest of the VLAN's I had to try and ensure nothing going on there. Now its on its own 10G interface. Results about the same.

                                          Another interesting fact. If I reverse the iperf direction. NAS to PFsense I can see the bandwidth spike up to more around the 2G range.

                                          Doing -P20 (20 transfers at once)
                                          [SUM] 0.00-10.00 sec 2.71 GBytes 2.33 Gbits/sec receiver

                                          Without, it will drop down to a little over 1G.

                                          Any ideas?

                                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                          • stephenw10S
                                            stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                                            last edited by

                                            Is that using the -R switch? Can you try running the actual client on the NAS and server on pfSense? That will open firewall states differently.

                                            You could also try disabling pf as a test. If there is a CPU restriction still that should show far higher throughput.

                                            Steve

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