SG-2440 Upload Speed Limited After a Few Minuites
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I did some more testing today. Here's what I tried.
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I tried connecting the pfSense WAN with the cable that worked with the laptop. I even tried it plugged into a different port in my modem. (The modem has a 4-port switch built in.) No change. I was still getting 9.5Mbps.
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I tried plugging in the cable that I was using with pfSense into the laptop... Basically plugged into the same port on the modem and same cable... Only change was I used the laptop instead of pfSense. This worked well and I had the full 20Mbps upload for repeated tests I did for at least 10 minutes. I think this eliminates any cabling problems.
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I next tried using another port (OPT2) as the WAN port. (All I did was swap the two in Interfaces --> Assignments and reboot after switching the cable over to OPT2.) This has been giving me consistent 20Mpbs upload for over 20 minutes. This kind of seems like a bad NIC in the pfSense, but only when uploading...
I'll keep monitoring the speed just to see what happens. Part of me thinks it will break again right as I click to submit this post.
Has anyone ever had a bad NIC like this or know what could cause it to happen? Are there any software tools that could confirm a bad NIC?
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Spoke to soon...
It's back at 9Mbps upload.
I guess it's not the NIC.
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I'm scratching my head here. Maybe try a different laptop, or a different NIC (e.g., USB-based) on the same laptop? I have (rarely) seen NICs that don't work well with each other, but work OK with other NICs.
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Yes, it's hard to know what would cause that sort of dynamic throughput. The only time I can recall seeing anything like that is with providers that specify an allowed throughput and police it rather than set it. Then they clamp you down to some much lower level if you go over it.
Try putting a switch between the modem and 2440 just to rule out some link negotiation issue if you can.
Steve
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Some more testing results...
Note: I've put the WAN cable back into the WAN port instead of the OPT2 port.
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I've now tried with a different laptop (this one has Realtek NIC vs the other laptop that had an Intel NIC... after about 2hrs, the laptop still shows 20Mbps upload every time. Same results as before.
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I've put a switch in between the modem and the pfSense WAN. This seemed ok for about 1hr, but then it went back to 9Mbps upload.
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Now that there's a switch in between the devices, I thought I'd try rebooting the pfSense and see what happens. My thoughts were that before when rebooting either device (modem or pfSense), the link gets dropped and either device could be doing some reset in software, etc. This time, with the switch, the link would stay up on the non-rebooted device. So, after a reboot of the pfSense, I'm back up to 20Mbps. (It's only been about 30 minutes of course, so this might not last.)
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I've also been doing some iperf tests from the command line of my pfsense box. I'm noticing that when I'm getting full bandwidth, the 'Retr' (Retransmitted TCP packets) column indicates zero 99% of the time. When I'm being limited to 9Mbps, I get many more occasional re-transmits in the iperf test. These are usually like 1-5, so it's not much, but it seems to come up in almost all tests when my upload is limited. When the upload is back up at 20Mbps, I'm constantly able to get all zeros except for the occasional test. I'm not sure if that's an indicator of anything though???
So, I'm very much scratching my head on this one also...
Anyone have any other ideas? -
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Quick addition to the above post...
Item #3... As expected, it eventually went back to 9Mbps. This time I rebooted the modem. An interesting result was found! Because the pfSense never lost the link (because of the switch), it never triggered any kind of reset. As soon as the modem came back up, I was still limited to 9Mbps.
This kind of leads me to believe there is something going on with pfSense where it is limiting upload for some reason somewhere. But where???
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@stephenw10 is there any benefit to having @steve1515 post hist config? Anything enabled should be in there, no?
Filter rules with rate limiting?
Some other package rate limiting? -
Have you tried just taking a backup of your config and then resetting the pfsense router and run a very vanilla install to see if your upload speed changes?
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@steve1515 said in SG-2440 Upload Speed Limited After a Few Minuites:
I've also been doing some iperf tests from the command line of my pfsense box. I'm noticing that when I'm getting full bandwidth, the 'Retr' (Retransmitted TCP packets) column indicates zero 99% of the time. When I'm being limited to 9Mbps, I get many more occasional re-transmits in the iperf test. These are usually like 1-5, so it's not much, but it seems to come up in almost all tests when my upload is limited. When the upload is back up at 20Mbps, I'm constantly able to get all zeros except for the occasional test. I'm not sure if that's an indicator of anything though??? ... I've put a switch in between the modem and the pfSense WAN. This seemed ok for about 1hr, but then it went back to 9Mbps upload.
This really sounds like physical ethernet errors are occurring. Has the 2440 been used in conditions where it might have been exposed to high humidity, noxious gases, excess vibration, overheating, overvoltage, ESD, etc? Have you tried swapping out the power supply? Have you tried testing speed between two ports on the 2440 configured as LANs?
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@mer and @gabacho4 Checking out the config is a good point. I'll look through it and see if I notice anything related to speed limiting. I haven't yet tried reloading the config. I was actually thinking of re-building from scratch once the next release comes out in January.
@bPsdTZpW The box is about 4 years old and connected to a UPS with line conditioning. I do have temp/humidity monitoring and in the last year, the max temp was 86 degF and max humidity was 51%.
I think it's a good thought about the power supply, but why would it never have an issue with 200Mbps downloading? The download speed is never limited.
I haven't swapped the LAN port because I've also been doing iperf tests from the firewall itself and that traffic doesn't touch the LAN port. The iperf tests have followed the issue as seen from the LAN devices though, so I feel its something else.
Note: I probably won't have much time the next couple of days to do any more testing, but will try as I can. I'm interested to know what the source of this issue is... that is if we can figure it out.
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I think it's a good thought about the power supply, but why would it never have an issue with 200Mbps downloading? The download speed is never limited.
Yeah, it doesn't make much sense, but sometimes hardware problems don't. I can point to several instances over my time as a device-driver developer for new hardware....
I haven't swapped the LAN port because I've also been doing iperf tests from the firewall itself and that traffic doesn't touch the LAN port. The iperf tests have followed the issue as seen from the LAN devices though, so I feel its something else.
Yeah, I missed that part, so I agree that the LAN ports don't seem to be involved.
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Mmm, I really can't think of anything you could configure that behaves like this. But after exhausting everything else testing with a clean config is a good idea.
It 'feels' like a link negotiation issue except that it persists between ports and the intermediate switch made no difference.
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It's unlikely -- but not unknown -- for devices to misbehave when used with certain other devices, intentionally or not. So on a lark, try changing your pfSense's hostname (system/general setup/hostname) to something quite different from its current value. Then reboot everything.
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I've now done even more testing. Things are getting interesting and strange...
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While doing testing, I began to realize that the issue occurs at a specific time which seems to be 58 minutes past each hour! I was able to confirm this a few times. 58 minutes past the hour seems to be when the upload speed gets limited.
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I figured with knowledge of above, I'd try swapping out the pfSense for a laptop again and seeing what happens at 58 minutes past the hour. Tried with two different laptops... one with an Intel card and one with a Realtek and the laptops both work fine... they don't get their upload limited.
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I looked through my pfSense config for any clues. I didn't see anything related to speed limiting.
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I tried to change the pfSense hostname to something random like pc398757 and rebooted both the modem and pfSense. At 58 past the hour, same thing happened... upload limited.
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I was able to get an SG-1100 to play with. I manually re-built my config (well 90% of it... I left out the OpenVPN server and pfBlockerNG). I didn't want to import the config in case something was bad in it, so I spent the time manually creating it again on the SG-1100. I swapped out the SG-2440 for the SG-1100. Guess what... at 58 past the hour... same thing... upload limited to 9Mbps!
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I didn't see this before, because on Windows apparently flow control info is impossible to find, but I did a live boot into Ubuntu and was able to see via dmesg every time I plugged in the Ethernet cable that it told me if flow control was enabled or not. The interesting results here are...
- Realtek NIC laptop connected to modem = flow control enabled
- Realtek NIC laptop connected to pfSense port = flow control enabled
- Intel NIC laptop connected to modem = no flow control
- Intel NIC laptop connected to pfSense port = no flow control
(Both laptops never showed the upload limiting issue.)
dmesg on pfSense doesn't list flow control information, so I'm not sure if there is any good way to see more info on the pfSense boxes or not.
So, my thoughts so far are conflicting...
Part of me feels like this is a link issue like we all initially thought, but the other part of me feels like it isn't because bad cables/links don't tell time and decide to fail at 58 minutes past the hour. The NICs are also Intel vs Marvell in my two pfSense boxes.Part of me also fees like this may be a software issue in pfSense due to it only occurring in my 2 pfSense boxes. But I'm thoroughly confused now and would like to hear what everyone else thinks? I could be wrong in my assumptions and dmesg may be lying to me.
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@steve1515 said in SG-2440 Upload Speed Limited After a Few Minuites:
. 58 minutes past the hour seems to be when the upload speed gets lim
Something in a cron job? Reloading something?
Something pushing stats/backup data to somewhere? -
I don't see any cron jobs in pfSense that I can see that would cause this. This is also on a new SG-1100 system as well, so I'm not sure what it could be.
Note: I'm not sure if this was clear before, but once the upload is limited it stays limited forever until I either unplug the WAN cable and re-plug it in or I reboot the pfSense box. This happened on both my SG-2440 and the SG-1100 I used for testing.
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Different DHCP lease times? Like something upstream is expiring the lease and using some default shaping?
Does it matter if 58mins past the hour is 10mins after connecting or nearly 1hour?Anything logged at all at 58mins past?
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It's a static IP on the WAN side, so I don't think it would be a DHCP issue. It also doesn't seem to matter if I reboot the modem or not or when I connect the WAN cable.
I think why I initially thought it was happening within 15 minutes, was because I was getting lucky and not noticing that it was time related before and was near the top of the hour. It doesn't seem to matter when I plug in though... once it's xx:58 on the clock it seems to happen.
I don't see anything logged at that time either.
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Hmm, if you disable ntp and set the clock in pfSense differently does it still happen at the same time?
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Modifying the pfSense clock was a great idea @stephenw10 !
When I disabled NTP and changed the clock on the pfSense box, the pfSense xx:58 time came and went without a loss in upload speed. When the actual time (from another NTP synced clock) hit xx:58 though, I lost my upload speed again.
This seems to go back to it being a modem/Comcast issue. The crazy thing is why only my 2 pfSense boxes even when tried with different MAC's/hostnames and never the 2 laptops?
