Inconsistent Slow Internet Speeds

[jmcmillen]

Hi

I'm new to pfsense, and firewalls in general. I've been playing around with a pfsense install on a dell optiplex 7010 and I'm struggling to get consistent gigabit speeds. When I run speed tests through speedtest.net, I can get around 700Mbps down and 940Mbps up, sometimes. However, it seems like half the time, the speed test drops to around 450Mbps down and only 40-50Mbps up.

If I switch to the ISP supplied router, I get 800-900+Mbps up and down, consistently. This makes me think that I've got a configuration issue in pfsense. The problem is that I just don't know what I should be looking for. I'm hoping someone here can help point me in the right direction.

I've looked through a few forum posts and tried a couple of things like moving the LAN and WAN connections to separate NICs. I also worked through some of the recommendations on the pfsense tuning page. tso/lro disabled. According to the monitor, I don't think I'm getting anywhere close to mbuf exhaustion.

I tried placing the ISP router in between the modem and the pfsense box. That got me to a consistent ~700Mbps down and 940Mbps up. But that's still not the speeds that I'm getting with just the ISP router, at least not download.

Has anyone experienced this before, or maybe have a thought on how to troubleshoot?

Dell Optiplex 7010
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3570 CPU @ 3.40GHz
8GB RAM
Dell Intel I350-T2 NIC

Thanks!

[michmoor]

@jmcmillen
What does CPU utilization look like during the speedtests?
Do you have any packages installed? If so which ones?

[jmcmillen]

@michmoor

Going by the system dashboard, CPU doesn't get over 9%. Memory is at 5%.

I haven't installed any packages myself.

[SteveITS]

@jmcmillen said in Inconsistent Slow Internet Speeds:

moving the LAN and WAN connections to separate NICs

If they were using the same NIC that would limit throughput right there. Though not to 40.

Try putting a switch between pfSense and the ISP router. (assume you changed patch cables...)

[jmcmillen]

@SteveITS

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll get my hands on another switch over the weekend and give it a shot. I've seen this suggested on other posts. What exactly does adding a switch in the middle do for us?

Also, I haven't switched cables since the same cables work fine when I drop back to the ISP provided router.

[SteveITS]

@jmcmillen It shouldn't do anything :) but per other posts some people say it solves link negotiation issues, or issues where the ISP router reboots and pfSense sees the NIC disconnect/reconnect and restarts packages.

I'd try another patch just to rule it out. I know it doesn't always make sense but...