Hi CPU usage when have high traffic

[YossiZa]

Hi!

I'm running a pfSense on dedicated machine and I have a lot of traffic.
My CPU is running on 90% in the minimum and getting evenly to 100%.
My traffic is between 5-7 Gbps and when I'm getting to high peaks my machine goes to 100% CPU and then I start to see loss.

my CPU: 2 CPUs E5-2620 and 64GB RAM
pfSense version: 2.4.5-RELEASE-p1

Is there any optimizations that I can do to increase the CPU usage? or that I need to replace my CPUs?

[provels]

@YossiZa Sounds like you need more hardware. Those procs are like 8 years old. What server platform and NICs?

[YossiZa]

The Server is Dell PowerEdge R620 and my network cards are Chelsio and Intel.
the Chelsio is Chelsio t520, the Intel one is not in use right now.

[Cool_Corona]

@YossiZa said in Hi CPU usage when have high traffic:

The Server is Dell PowerEdge R620 and my network cards are Chelsio and Intel.
the Chelsio is Chelsio t520, the Intel one is not in use right now.

How many cores??

[YossiZa]

2 CPUs Intel Xeon E5-2620, 12 cores total
hyperthreading is off in BIOS.

[bobbenheim]

Have you done any optimizations so far?

[YossiZa]

we've done a few optimizations in the pfSense's settings.

The problem was solved just when we replaced the CPUs to a new model(from E5-2620 to E5-2680 v2).
The CPU usage reduced from 90% to 30%-35% and in full load it goes to ~50%.

[Harvy66]

@YossiZa said in Hi CPU usage when have high traffic:

E5-2680 v2

E5-2680 v2 has 40% more memory bandwidth. CPU usage is not just a metric of how hard a CPU is working, it's a metric of how many cycles the CPU is having to wait for work to be done. CPU bound work is as fast as the CPU can process it. But memory bound work has to wait for the memory to respond. If the memory is at its max, then the CPU will spend more time waiting not doing anything. The more cache can't hurt either. Fewer memory accesses required.