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    Slow upload speed [SOLVED]

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
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    • H
      Harvy66
      last edited by

      Have you looked under System Activity to see what the load is like and what's causing the load? Many times low performance is because something is consume a lot of CPU, but not all of the time.

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      • A
        almabes
        last edited by

        Enable powerd and set it for maximum or hiadaptive.
        See if that helps.  Maybe your CPU isn't ramping up the MHz as the load increases.  I know it is an issue on the netgate rangely platforms.

        YMMV

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        • J
          joda
          last edited by

          Hi,

          Some more testing.

          Have turned on PowerD and set it to maximum.

          Here's a dump from System Activity in the middle of a running speedtest

          last pid: 15237;  load averages:  0.30,  0.18,  0.10  up 3+19:26:50    17:29:22
          106 processes: 3 running, 83 sleeping, 19 waiting, 1 lock

          Mem: 10M Active, 49M Inact, 48M Wired, 50M Buf, 857M Free
          Swap: 2048M Total, 2048M Free

          PID USERNAME PRI NICE  SIZE    RES STATE    TIME    WCPU COMMAND
            11 root    155 ki31    0K    8K RUN    87.3H  58.59% [idle]
            12 root    -92    -    0K  152K WAIT    15:34  26.66% [intr{irq256: re0}]
            12 root    -92    -    0K  152K WAIT    10:35  14.06% [intr{irq257: re1}]

          Not really that high load, 0,30 - 0,40.
          Is the amount of interrupts on the NICs normal when speedtesting?

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          • H
            heper
            last edited by

            normal? not really … but realtek nics are famous for being horrible. (specially with freebsd)

            you could attempt to enable 'device polling'  (system-->advanced-->networking). it's intended to stop/greatly reduce interrupts.

            DISCLAIMER:
            i have no idea if your nic is supported, so it could possibly go wrong and unable to access anything anymore.
            enablling device polling is generally not recommanded in any normal situation, but who knows....

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            • H
              Harvy66
              last edited by

              50% interrupt usage at 25Mb/s is really bad. My Intel NIC hangs around 5% at 1Gb.

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              • J
                joda
                last edited by

                It didn't support polling so it kinda got stuck when I enabled it.

                @harvy66: What boggles me is that I get 100Mbit downstream without any issues, but only 25 up. As if the amount of interrupts would differ(?)

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                • H
                  Harvy66
                  last edited by

                  Ahh yeah, missed that part. The only guess I can come up with is either the drivers are written that way or there is an interaction between the drivers and how FreeBSD handles moving data. I see no difference in interrupts for uploading or download, except if you include traffic shaping.

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                  • J
                    joda
                    last edited by

                    After alot of desperate attempts, some of them being less scientific than others, I tried putting a 100Mbit switch between the WAN interface and the ISP termination. Turns out I'm now able to do 100/100.

                    I remove the switch and force the WAN interface to 100Mbit full-duplex (instead of the auto-neg 1Gbit), now 100/100 up/down works like a charm.
                    Interrupts on the NICs are down to just below 20%.

                    I guess this is another case of Realtek hardware/drivers. However the Linux kernel driver seems to be addressing this better.

                    Thanks for all the help and replys on the way!

                    M 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                    • M
                      mbmondor
                      last edited by

                      drivers. set it up to vmx and all works fine :)

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                      • JKnottJ
                        JKnott @joda
                        last edited by

                        @joda

                        Are you using WiFi? That will always provide poorer performance. For example, my connection is 500/20 Mb. When connected via Ethernet, I generally get 550 - 560 Mb down. On 802.11n WiFi, I get about 30 - 40 down. The Ethernet port for my WiFi AP is 100 Mb.

                        PfSense running on Qotom mini PC
                        i5 CPU, 4 GB memory, 32 GB SSD & 4 Intel Gb Ethernet ports.
                        UniFi AC-Lite access point

                        I haven't lost my mind. It's around here...somewhere...

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                        • M
                          mbmondor @JKnott
                          last edited by

                          @JKnott it was drivers, i am using proxmox and the native network driver gave no upload speed lol. i am in full throttle on my 5ghz :) wifi and hard wired also :)

                          JKnottJ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • JKnottJ
                            JKnott @mbmondor
                            last edited by

                            @mbmondor

                            I just tried speedtest again and here's the result. I have seen a bit better. So, pfsense can definitely handle that sort of performance.

                            PfSense running on Qotom mini PC
                            i5 CPU, 4 GB memory, 32 GB SSD & 4 Intel Gb Ethernet ports.
                            UniFi AC-Lite access point

                            I haven't lost my mind. It's around here...somewhere...

                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • M
                              mr-elamin2 @joda
                              last edited by

                              @joda We are now in 2023 and this solution has solved my my problem, I replaced the switch with an old 100 mbps switch and it has worked.
                              What I am thinking about right now is to confer SET (Switch Embedded Team) with one Team Member Port in Hyper-V, after that I think I could use my 1GB switch.

                              Thanks alot!

                              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
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