Issue or random fluke?

[jcp]

first of all thanks for taking the time to read this any input will be most appreciated… i've been running pfsense for my home network since 2009, rarely have i ever had issues which i couldn't figure out. well that is until today. at some point last night my pfsense machine went into some sort of loop for about 3 hours in which the LAN side of my network died. during this time my network was mostly idle i think the most traffic was probably from someone watching a youtube video at best. the system log stops logging anything after about 3 hours relating to what was going on. it seems the wan side stayed active, what it was repeating is:

Jul 20 23:00:36 kernel em1: RX Next to Refresh = 345
Jul 20 23:00:36 kernel em1: RX Next to Check = 346
Jul 20 23:00:36 kernel em1: RX discarded packets = 0
Jul 20 23:00:36 kernel em1: hw rdh = -1, hw rdt = -1
Jul 20 23:00:36 kernel em1: RX Queue 0 ------
Jul 20 23:00:36 kernel em1: Tx Descriptors avail failure = 167
Jul 20 23:00:36 kernel em1: TX descriptors avail = 40
Jul 20 23:00:36 kernel em1: Tx Queue Status = -2147483648
Jul 20 23:00:36 kernel em1: hw tdh = -1, hw tdt = -1
Jul 20 23:00:36 kernel em1: TX Queue 0 ------
Jul 20 23:00:36 kernel Interface is RUNNING and ACTIVE
Jul 20 23:00:36 kernel em1: Watchdog timeout Queue[0]– resetting

to the final log relating to this being:
Jul 21 02:41:46 kernel em1: RX Next to Refresh = 0
Jul 21 02:41:46 kernel em1: RX Next to Check = 0
Jul 21 02:41:46 kernel em1: RX discarded packets = 0
Jul 21 02:41:46 kernel em1: hw rdh = -1, hw rdt = -1
Jul 21 02:41:46 kernel em1: RX Queue 0 ------
Jul 21 02:41:46 kernel em1: Tx Descriptors avail failure = 3140
Jul 21 02:41:46 kernel em1: TX descriptors avail = 40
Jul 21 02:41:46 kernel em1: Tx Queue Status = -2147483648
Jul 21 02:41:46 kernel em1: hw tdh = -1, hw tdt = -1
Jul 21 02:41:46 kernel em1: TX Queue 0 ------
Jul 21 02:41:46 kernel Interface is RUNNING and ACTIVE
Jul 21 02:41:46 kernel em1: Watchdog timeout Queue[0]– resetting

so almost 3 hours of this repeating what seems every 4-5 minutes. i use all intel nics em0 and em1 are a dual port intel nic, em1 is the the lan side. wan is on em2 which is the onboard nic on the dell motherboard i'm using. again thanks for looking any suggestion or any info that's needed just let me know and i'll do my best to provide it.

[Guest]

Did you upgrade your pfSense in the last time? And on what version your are now?

• You could try out to set the maximum queues size to the network adapters (Onboard NIC)
• You could also try out to set another mbuf size likes to 1000000
• You could try out at first to use both Ports from your Intel dual port NICs
  And then once more again trying perhaps out to solve this by playing around with the NIC tunings

[jcp]

i'm on 2.3.4 - p1.. the newest. also the problem occured on that nic, while these are good places to start i was wondering if anyone ran into anything like this before, or if this was indicative of possible hardware failure… thank you