pfSense intermittent disconnects / hangs

[Nizam]

Hi everyone. This is my first post here so please go easy.

I've been chasing down a non responsive issue on my firewall. It will randomly stop working until I reboot it.

I came across this picture from the failure last night: which kind of points me in the right direction, but I don't know what process is running away.

This is on an HP Proliant dl120 G6 which I think is overkill so it shouldn't fail like this.

Version 2.4.4-RELEASE (amd64)
built on Thu Sep 20 09:03:12 EDT 2018
FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE-p3

The system is on the latest version.
Version information updated at Tue Oct 30 13:41:02 EDT 2018
CPU Type Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHz
Current: 2267 MHz, Max: 2268 MHz
16 CPUs: 2 package(s) x 4 core(s) x 2 hardware threads
AES-NI CPU Crypto: No

I have two OpenVPN connections to PIA VPN and one OpenVPN connection to another pfSense box at another site (no issues with that firewall).

While RDPing into my PC at home through / behind this firewall, every 15-30 seconds the RDP client would 'pause' and then continue again. Other drops like this can be seen on my Android box while viewing a live stream.

My Nest devices frequently tell me my cameras are offline.

Any help would be most appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Nizam.

[stephenw10]

I would try to catch whatever is doing it by running top -aSH at the command line.

That is a high number of processes though even when it's running normally. If you have something that is hanging traffic every 30s though I would expect it to use a lot of CPU time and be clearly visible there.

Steve