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    Half network performance compared to clean FreeBSD

    General pfSense Questions
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    • M
      MrCCL last edited by

      I only get half network performance doing a simple bandwidth test on the LAN side using iperf3,  and this is on a clean pfsense install.
      If I do a clean install of FreeBSD I get full bandwidth, i.e. more than 100MB/s.

      
      router to client
      [  4]   9.00-10.00  sec  37.0 MBytes   310 Mbits/sec
      
      client to router
      [  4]   9.00-10.00  sec  49.8 MBytes   418 Mbits/sec
      
      

      What does pfsense change/modify in regards to the basic network setup on FreeBSD that is likely to have this effect?
      Or do you have any other clues what to do?

      Hardware
      SuperMicro X7SPE-H (Atom D510, chipset Intel ICH9R, 2xIntel 82574L NICs)

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      • H
        heper last edited by

        this question comes up every couple of days, but lets go again:

        default freebsd is configured as an endpoint / pfSense is configured as a router/firewall.
        freebsd doesn't do firewalling out of the box / pfSense does.
        Disabling firewalling on pfsense will increase your "bandwidth" performance somewhat … it won't be the same as clean freeBSD tho.

        to see' performance you should measure throughput, so instead of running iperf on pfSense run it like that:

        <iperf-client>  ---  <pfsense>---</pfsense></iperf-client>

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        • M
          MrCCL last edited by

          Ahh….it suddenly changed things :-)

          Now I get 112/MBs and no impact on CPU usage at all! :-)

          
          [  4]   9.00-10.00  sec   112 MBytes   943 Mbits/sec
          
          

          I just expected that pfSense's router/firewall functionally wouldn't play any part if I did a router<->LAN test, but I guess I was wrong.
          I would of course expect a decrease in throughput going through the NAT/firewall (WAN <-> router <-> LAN).

          But this is of course not a in-real-life problem, as the pfsense rarely play any other server-role than being firewall.

          Running iperf3 on the router, not only I got the pure bandwidth, but it also used 100% usage.

          Thanks for clearing it out, and I'm sorry I missed the other threads about it…...I did search the forum but I guess I did a wrong search.

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          • H
            Harvy66 last edited by

            One of the many differences is iperf is in userland and packets moving to/from the network must go through kernel space to the userland, which is a lot of extra overhead. You can tweak the OS to be better at this, but sometimes comes as other costs. As a router/firewall, the packets stay in the kernel and certain optimizations can be done.

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