Performance issue on virtualised pfSense

stephenw10

Usually by checking the man page like: vmx(4)
Most drivers don't require anything, vmx has specific instructions.

Most drivers support multiple hardware chips so the number of queues available will depend on that.

Drivers that do will be limited by the number of CPU cores or the number of queues the hardware supports. Whichever is greater. So at boot you may see:

ix3: <Intel(R) X553 L (1GbE)> mem 0x80800000-0x809fffff,0x80c00000-0x80c03fff at device 0.1 on pci9
ix3: Using 2048 TX descriptors and 2048 RX descriptors
ix3: Using 2 RX queues 2 TX queues
ix3: Using MSI-X interrupts with 3 vectors
ix3: allocated for 2 queues
ix3: allocated for 2 rx queues

That's on a 4100 but on a 6100 the same NIC shows:

ix3: <Intel(R) X553 L (1GbE)> mem 0x80800000-0x809fffff,0x80c00000-0x80c03fff at device 0.1 on pci10
ix3: Using 2048 TX descriptors and 2048 RX descriptors
ix3: Using 4 RX queues 4 TX queues
ix3: Using MSI-X interrupts with 5 vectors
ix3: allocated for 4 queues
ix3: allocated for 4 rx queues

Steve

shshs

@stephenw10 we don't have vmxnet driver in KVM, where did you get it?

stephenw10

It's available by default in Proxmox:

And since that is built on KVM I would assume it can be used there also. I have no idea how to add though.

Steve

chrcoluk

@stephenw10 yeah i forgot proxmox supports 'vmxnet', I assume its not as optimised as it is in esxi, but I do wonder if a multi queue 'vmxnet' on proxmox is more capable than a single queue 'vtnet'. It will be interesting to find out.