Upload speed difference between physical and virtual pfsense

budipran1

Hi all,
I’ve recently started using pfsense as a router at home and I was recommended to have a backup router in case things go wrong. I was originally wanting to have everything virtualised in my unraid box and I got that up and running just fine, I purchased an old hp t630 thin client as a backup router.

My ISP speed is supposed to be 300 down 100 up. My virtual pfsense runs on unraid with i3-8100, with 4 intel nic card and achieved 300 down 60 up using separate dedicated ports for wan and lan.

I set up my back up physical router with a “router on a stick” setup as it only had 1 nic and my ISP requires a vlan tag 10 on the WAN port, it worked fine as well and achieved 300 down and 100 up.

I originally thought it was the router on a stick thing that was giving it the speed advantage so I switched my virtual pfsense to the same setup and still only achieves 300/60.

Any clues to why this may be? Is this just the limitations of virtualisation, or do I have a bad hardware?

Cool_Corona

Check your NIC speed settings and cables.

Virtualisation shouldnt add 40% overhead no matter the direction of traffic.

SteveITS

@budipran1 What is the hypervisor?
See: https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/virtualization/index.html

budipran1

@cool_corona as far as I can tell I’ve set it to auto, and I don’t see anything that would limit it. Have tried a couple of cables, no difference.

budipran1

@steveits I’m running unraid (which is based off linux) just because I already had it running at home.

I’m well aware that its not one of the commonly recommended hypervisor for pfsense but it would appear some people have made it work with no problems.

budipran1

Update: Found the culprit, something around the traffic shaper is messing it up, when I remove the traffic shaper rules, it went up to 315/110. But when I introduce traffic shaper speed limit (even if the upload is set at 100), the upload speed goes down to 60.

Very odd, considering how my traffic shaper settings are identical on both routers. I’ll play around with the traffic shaper.