Throuput Question
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First a little background. I'm running pfSense-1.2.3-RC1 running on a AMD Dual Core 2ghz processor. In the machine I'm using the onboard nvidia 10/100 as my wan interface then in the box I have two Realtec 10/100/1000 PCI nics. The first pc nic I have setup as LAN the other nic is setup as opt 1. I have the opt1 bridged to the lan interface, to supply dhcp information. The lan card goes to a gig switch that has my main pc on it along with a few stragglers I'm working on. The opt1 card goes to another gig switch that has my 360, along with my main file server. The file server is An athlon X2 3.0ghz with 2.5tb software raid 5 array.
Okay, both the file server and my main pc have gig nics in them. That are linking at gig. The file server is running server 2008 while my main pc has xp pro. On the pcsense pc I have hardware checksum unloading turned off, I also have device polling turnd on. I'm not using traffic shaping or any other services. This is pretty much a new box aside from the forwarding I had to do to get DHCP to go across, along with samba.
Prior to setting up the PFsense system I was using a Linksys WRT310N router with ddwrt on it. In this exact scenario with the linksys I could get 30+ MB/s transfer between the main pc and server. With the pfsense I seem to max out at around 20. During transfer cpu load doesn't go above 30%. I'm looking for something I may have missed that would cause such a dramatic drop in transfer? Would using the prior release help me, or is it something else I'm missing?
Thanks for the help!
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Edit: I forgot to include the pfsense box has 2gigs of DDR2 800 memory in a dual channel configuration.
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Also, the files I'm transferring are mostly large iso's in the range of 6-8gb. If you need any other info let me know.
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Here is the full pfsense box info.
Processors 2
Model AMD Athlon
64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3600+
CPU Speed 2.01 GHz
PCI Devices- atapci0: nVidia nForce MCP61 UDMA133 controller
- atapci1: nVidia nForce MCP61 SATA300 controller
- atapci2: nVidia nForce MCP61 SATA300 controller
- ehci0: EHCI (generic) USB 2.0 controller
- isab0: PCI-ISA bridge
- nfe0: NVIDIA nForce MCP61 Networking Adapter
- ohci0: OHCI (generic) USB controller
- pcib1: ACPI PCI-PCI bridge
- pcib2: ACPI PCI-PCI bridge
- pcib3: ACPI PCI-PCI bridge
- pcib4: ACPI PCI-PCI bridge
- re0: RealTek 8169/8169S/8169SB(L)/8110S/8110SB(L) Gigabit Ethernet
- re1: RealTek 8169/8169S/8169SB(L)/8110S/8110SB(L) Gigabit Ethernet
- vgapci0: VGA-compatible display
IDE Devices - ad4: WDC WD800JD-00MSA1 10.01E01 (Capacity: 78.18 GB)
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Realtek cards are notorious for being the worst kind of NIC you can have in your router.
Also 32bit PCI maxes out at 1Gbit total.
So for two interfaces 500Mbit (62.5 MB/s) or 250Mbit (31.25 MB/s) full duplex. -
Thanks for the reply, looking around intel gig nics can be had fairly cheap. I'd like to go with the dual port pci-e server card, but they seem a bit out of my current price range….
I'm going to snag two of those nics and will report back..
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Out of curiosity, how would on board pci-e be comparatively to dual gig on board?
