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    Cannot Achieve 10g pfsense bottleneck

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
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    • w0wW Away
      w0w @stephenw10
      last edited by

      @stephenw10 said in Cannot Achieve 10g pfsense bottleneck:

      about 2 hours ago

      Right but no difference to the the throughput of the resulting install.

      Definitely yes. 😁

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      • P Offline
        pwood999 @Averlon
        last edited by

        @Averlon The reason I suggest testing each server to & from PfSense was just to verify that part of the E2E path - especially as the 25G link is used for all VLAN's to the Microtik.

        Server1 --> Microtik --> PfSense (DS & US)
        Server2 --> Microtik --> PfSense (DS & US)

        It would at least verify the firewall rules on the VLAN's & the VLAN's through the Microtik can pass the full bandwidth.

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        • LaxarusL Offline
          Laxarus @w0w
          last edited by

          @w0w said in Cannot Achieve 10g pfsense bottleneck:

          @Laxarus try the iperf command provided in my previous message and post back the results.

          still 5G and occasional 6G

          @Averlon said in Cannot Achieve 10g pfsense bottleneck:

          My suggestion is to disable HT / SMT, scale queues down to 4 and there might be another improvement. The Intel SpeedShift may work better on packed level rather than core level.

          disabled HT but this did not make any difference

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          • w0wW Away
            w0w @Laxarus
            last edited by

            @Laxarus said in Cannot Achieve 10g pfsense bottleneck:

            still 5G and occasional 6G

            OK, so how exactly is the Intel XXV710 dual 25G connected to the Ubiquiti switch, and what is the exact switch model, ports, cables, and transceivers you’re using if any?

            LaxarusL 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • LaxarusL Offline
              Laxarus @w0w
              last edited by Laxarus

              @w0w
              Switch: USW-EnterpriseXG-24
              Connection: Unifi SFP28 DAC cable (UC-DAC-SFP28)

              24e328d6-c156-4512-b704-358648d223b3-image.png

              I disabled the LAGG so there is only a single cable now.

              Do you think these cables dont play nice with pfsense?

              But I also tested the 10g rj-45 built-in port but still no difference so I've ruled this out.

              At this point, I am entertaining the idea of putting all 10G devices in same vlan/switch and stick with L2.

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              • w0wW Away
                w0w @Laxarus
                last edited by

                @Laxarus said in Cannot Achieve 10g pfsense bottleneck:

                Do you think these cables dont play nice with pfsense?

                I don’t think so. The more I look at it, the more I think it’s some software glitch — but where exactly is the bottleneck? It looks just like some queues/limiters. This CPU should do 30-40 Gbit with fw filtering and 60 Gbit just for routing. I don’t know — something is broken.

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                • P Offline
                  pwood999
                  last edited by pwood999

                  Maybe share your PfSense config, with any public IP's, Certs, etc. obfuscated ?

                  Or just screenshots of the VLAN firewall rules & any Limiter/Shaper queue settings ?

                  Check this post or an XML Redactor that might be helpful.
                  link redactor

                  LaxarusL 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • A Offline
                    Averlon @Laxarus
                    last edited by Averlon

                    @Laxarus said in Cannot Achieve 10g pfsense bottleneck:

                    disabled HT but this did not make any difference

                    Did you configure the NIC queues down to 4 as well and tested SpeedShift at Package Level? The hwpstate_intel driver works quite well with Broadwell CPUs and does shown improvements (according to your post) towards 6Gbps on your Skylake CPUs. Compared to your previous posted results, this is an improvement of almost 1Gbps.

                    How is the throughput if you disable the firewall (pfctl -d) and use pfsense as router only. NAT won't be available once you disable the firewall. You can re-enable by running pfctl -e and it will load your last ruleset. If you don't see any significant difference with firewall disabled, you can be at least sure, it's not the firewall ruleset slowing things down.

                    What about the interface counter on that Ubiquiti switch, especially the ones for the 25gbps Uplinks - are there any error counter / drops shown?

                    L 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • L Offline
                      louis2 @Averlon
                      last edited by louis2

                      @Averlon

                      Just for info.

                      When transferring large files between my TrueNas system and my Windows11 Pro PC, both using NVME SSD. I have transfer speeds above 5Gbit.

                      Situation is as follows:

                      • NAS <> 10G-switch <> pfSense <(lagg)> 10G-switch <> PC.
                      • NAS, pfSense and PC all equipped with ConnectX4 cards used at a speed of 10G.
                      • using jumbo frames (9000) on the connection
                      • transferring data between two NVME SSD's
                      • PC to NAS 5Gbit
                      • NAS to PC almost 9Gbit
                      • my fpSense system is build arround a older PC-mainbord having an Intel i5 6600K systeem (kaby lake Q1 2017). 4 core CPU

                      I am almost sure the PC is the speed limiting factor. The PC performance when transferring small files is 'dramatic'Intel i5 6600K systeem (kaby lake Q1 2017). 4 core

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                      • LaxarusL Offline
                        Laxarus @pwood999
                        last edited by Laxarus

                        @pwood999 said in Cannot Achieve 10g pfsense bottleneck:

                        Maybe share your PfSense config, with any public IP's, Certs, etc. obfuscated ?

                        Or just screenshots of the VLAN firewall rules & any Limiter/Shaper queue settings ?

                        Check this post or an XML Redactor that might be helpful.
                        link redactor

                        I will check what I can do about sharing the config. I think I saw some github repo for anonymizing the config.
                        Edit: Yep found it
                        Github pfsense-redactor

                        @Averlon said in Cannot Achieve 10g pfsense bottleneck:

                        Did you configure the NIC queues down to 4 as well and tested SpeedShift at Package Level? The hwpstate_intel driver works quite well with Broadwell CPUs and does shown improvements (according to your post) towards 6Gbps on your Skylake CPUs. Compared to your previous posted results, this is an improvement of almost 1Gbps.

                        Yeah, I did all that. But 6G is not consistent, I am still getting mostly 5G.

                        I still think some configuration issue on the pfsense side of things. I am considering making a fresh install and testing things out then reloading my config.

                        @Averlon said in Cannot Achieve 10g pfsense bottleneck:

                        What about the interface counter on that Ubiquiti switch, especially the ones for the 25gbps Uplinks - are there any error counter / drops shown?

                        I see no errors.

                        @louis2 said in Cannot Achieve 10g pfsense bottleneck:

                        I am almost sure the PC is the speed limiting factor. The PC performance when transferring small files is 'dramatic'Intel i5 6600K systeem (kaby lake Q1 2017). 4 core

                        not similar to my case since I can achieve 10g on L2 with the same devices I test so I've ruled out the clients as the limiting factor.

                        I will try to adjust my settings as close to defaults as possible to see if it makes any difference.

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