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    Solved: pfSense as bhyve guest only gives 60Mbit instead 200+

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
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    • stephenw10S
      stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
      last edited by

      Well at a basic level that points to the receive speed of the pfSense LAN interface.

      If you previously swapped those it would have been the download to WAN that was affected, which does look to have been the case.

      Steve

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      • S
        soupdiver @stephenw10
        last edited by

        @stephenw10 said in pfSense as bhyve guest only gives 60Mbit instead 200+:

        Well at a basic level that points to the receive speed of the pfSense LAN interface.

        If you previously swapped those it would have been the download to WAN that was affected, which does look to have been the case.

        Steve

        Hmm not sure how to understand this.

        In the very beginning I had the internal NIC and the USB dongle. I removed the USB dongle from the setup, so there is only 1 NIC involved now.

        Download speed was capped 90Mbit/s previously and now I'm at 0.65 Mbit/s. Also seems very far off.

        When I do the speed test from within the pfSense VM I have full-speed. So I think all the involved interfaces are ok.
        The only difference seems to be when the traffic originates from outside the NUC.

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        • S
          soupdiver
          last edited by soupdiver

          Well at a basic level that points to the receive speed of the pfSense LAN interface.

          Yea but only when uploading to the internet it seems. Downloads seems fine and it's the same port/interface/vlan.

          I also tried to copy some files around in my network. No connection issues whatsoever. I can send/receive between my computer and the pfSense VM with full speed of 1GBit/s.

          scp copy between pfSense and network client:
          46% 1944MB 105.9MB/s 00:21 ETA

          Summary:
          client => internet: not ok
          pfSense => internet: ok
          NUC => internet: ok
          client => pfSense: ok

          Seems all individual parts are ok but something is odd when routing client traffic to the internet.

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          • S
            soupdiver
            last edited by soupdiver

            @soupdiver said in pfSense as bhyve guest only gives 60Mbit instead 200+:

            Ok, I can finally report success

            haha that was too quick.
            It seems I still have all kind of weird issues. I hope there is a common root cause somewhere.

            Issues:

            • slow uplink from any network client except from the NUC itself but the speed for clients varies between 0.1 Mbits/ and 6 Mbit/s. Cable/wifi seems not to matter
            • IPv6 issues, I get a prefix and the clients get a v6 address but incoming ICMP fails and accessing netflix via v6 also fails
            • "interesting" Spotify issue: One computer can access Spotify while the other can only play music that has already been started or be used as a remote device and then start playing tracks. Starting a track on the computer directly doesn't work. Another machine in the same wlan/network works without issues

            As soon as I switched from my NUC/pfSense setup to my FritzBox again everything works perfectly again. So I assume it must be something with the pfSense box but I have no clue since it feels so random. I'm grateful for ideas where I can continue digging.

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            • stephenw10S
              stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
              last edited by

              Ah, I'm sorry I conflated some threads there I think!

              Hmm, that level of throttling is usually something low lever like a speed/duplex mismatch or ecven bad hardware but obviously that cannot be the case in a VM.

              I would think it's got to be a VLAN or MTU config problem with how that's behaving.

              How are you testing from the client to pfSense dircetly? iperf? I would suggest that if not.

              Steve

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              • S
                soupdiver
                last edited by

                I would think it's got to be a VLAN or MTU config problem with how that's behaving.

                I tried the usual MTUs of 1500 and 1492. When set to 1500 I saw a log that my provider set it to 1492. When I set that value the log disappeared. Sounds reasonable.

                Anything special for MTU in combination with a vlan?

                How are you testing from the client to pfSense dircetly? iperf? I would suggest that if not.

                I did a scp file transfer and got full speed all the time.

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                • stephenw10S
                  stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                  last edited by

                  VLAN tags add an additional 4 bytes to the packets. Normally not an issue but if something in the path is really at 1500B and path MTU is broken it might be.
                  Try setting it to 1300 to be sure.

                  Did you test SCP both ways between the client and pfSense?

                  Steve

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                  • S
                    soupdiver
                    last edited by

                    @stephenw10 said in pfSense as bhyve guest only gives 60Mbit instead 200+:

                    Did you test SCP both ways between the client and pfSense?

                    yea tried it both ways

                    Will test a pfSense setup natively on the NUC tomorrow and see what that brings.

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                    • S
                      soupdiver
                      last edited by

                      Will test a pfSense setup natively on the NUC tomorrow and see what that brings.

                      So I installed pfSense directly on the NUC without any virtualisation and everything works as it should. ๐Ÿ‘ Uplink, Downlink, v4, v6... all works.

                      While this is good... now I have my NUC occupied just by pfSense. Not really what I wanted but at least I have it working for the first time.

                      I still have absolutely no clue what could be issue with my crippled uplink since all the single parts of the connection seemed fine. ๐Ÿคท
                      Gonna give it another try at some point I guess

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                      • stephenw10S
                        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                        last edited by stephenw10

                        Mmm, some virtualisation quirk...

                        You might try something other than bhyve. I run Proxmox (KVM) on a NUC here, works great.

                        Steve

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                        • N
                          netblues @stephenw10
                          last edited by

                          Pfsense on centos8 kvm on nuc here
                          Works also great :)

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                          • S
                            soupdiver
                            last edited by soupdiver

                            Ok, I think I can report success again ๐Ÿ˜

                            I reinstalled everything a couple of times to try out some different things. I tried a vale switch but that also just gave me 100Mbit/s in local throughput.

                            Afterwards I thought again and tried the basic vlan setup again that I had in the beginning because I couldn't find a clue what was wrong.
                            So I set it all up again...

                            • pfSense insdie bhve vm
                            • nuc connected to trunk port
                            • split vlans on host and pass vlans through tap devices to vm
                            • configure PPPoE inside pfSense

                            So far so good and everything was fine. I got IPv4 connectivity and full-speed.
                            Then I enabled IPv6 and my weird issues started again. Spotify won't play tracks and crippled upload speed. Not sure why I did not made the connection to IPv6 before.
                            Then I found a thread in this forum: https://forum.netgate.com/topic/72148/slow-upload-speed-test-through-ipv6-solved

                            I'm not 100% what "Large Segment Offload" it but disabling it solved my issue.
                            ifconfig em0 -lro

                            So yea... I might reached the end of my journey haha.

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                            • stephenw10S
                              stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                              last edited by

                              Nice catch. ๐Ÿ‘

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