Upgraded from an Intel X520-DA2 to Chelsio T520-CR and iperf dropped from 9.9Gbps to 7Gbps
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My pfSense box consists of the following:
pfSense 2.4.4-RELEASE-p3
Supermicro X10SRL-F motherboard with BIOS 2.0
Intel Xeon E5 2683 v3 CPU 14 cores
32GB of DDR4 2133 RAM
Supermicro 32GB SATA DOMI ran an Intel X520 in it initially and all was well, but I upgraded over the weekend to a T520-CR and I noticed on the initial boot, that pfSense appeared to update the firmware on it.
The web GUI seems a little choppy at times compared to the Intel NIC. But today I did some iperf testing and found performance to be only 70% of what it should be.
Are there known issues with Chelsio NICs in Supermicro motherboards? Do I need to upgrade the BIOS? (current version is 3.2 and I'm on 2.0)
Do I need updated drivers or firmware for the T520-CR or was that taken care of on the first boot and I noted above?
Thanks!
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The firmware will have been updated by the driver if it was older on the card.
You should be able to see it from:sysctl dev.t5nex.0.firmware_versionI believe the version in pfSense 2.4.4 is still 1.19.1.0 but there are newer firmware versions available.
You can update it using cxgbetool from the cli. However I would nit expect it to gave made that much difference.Try testing with
top -aSHrunning to see how the load is spread and what it using CPU cycles.Steve
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Yep, I'm on firmware 1.19.1.0.
Turns out that my main issue was that the client I was running iperf on was the bottleneck. I got much better results when another client as seen here:
Ran the test again this morning with top as well using the arguments you suggested. For some reason I was down by about 1 Gbps compared to my previous test. Not sure why.
Maybe I'll put the Intel X520 NIC back in there alongside the T520-CR to do some back to back tests.
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Looks like you're running iperf on pfSense which is not really a good test. That could be the limit.
Much better to test between LAN and LAN2 with separate iperf server and client if you can.
Steve
