Can't get full bandwidth

[nrlazmi]

Hi, I'm very new to pfsense, so forgive me if this question has been answered before.

I have a PF box made out of Pentium 4 2.2Ghz with 512Mb RAM, using pfsense 1.2.3. The box is used as a router and for distributing internet bandwidth fairly to about 30 clients. I have two NICs, one for WAN and another for LAN, both using PCI 10/100Mb card. For internet connection (WAN) I use PPPoE connection with bandwidth of 2Mbps up, and 328kbps down.

My problem is that when I test my download and upload bandwidth using www.speedtest.net, I manage only to get about 0.12Mbps download speed. I've tried to tweek my traffic shaper, but to no effect. I've already uninstall squid and snort, but I still get the same result. At one point, I also disable traffic shaper and still get the same result.

Currently I use traffic shaper with the following queue setting:

Flags Priority Default Bandwidth Name 
                0    No          342 Kb          qwanRoot     
                0    No          1800 Kb          qlanRoot     
                1    Yes              5 %            qwandef     
                1    Yes            10 %            qlandef     
ACK          7    No            60 %            qwanacks     
ACK          7    No            25 %            qlanacks     
RED ECN    1    No            1 %            qP2PUp     
RED ECN    1    No            1 %            qP2PDown     
RED ECN    4    No            25 %            qOthersUpH     
RED ECN    4    No            60 %            qOthersDownH     
RED ECN    2    No            1 %            qOthersUpL     
RED ECN    2    No            1 %            qOthersDownL

Is this normal or have I screwed up somewhere? Please help.

[jimp]

If you disabled the shaper and had the same result, it is probably not due to the shaper configuration.

It may be something with your WAN configuration, perhaps the MTU.

[nrlazmi]

jimp, thanks for the reply.

I have decided to test my pf box at other location with the same PPPoE speed, but have less users behind it (2 users including me!). What I found is that when I do the bandwidth test at this location with www.speedtest.net, my download bandwidth is shown as 1.60Mbps!

So I guess, my bandwidth is slow before because of heavy usage by users, not because of any settings in pfsense! Silly me….

I also test my bandwidth (behind pf box that is) for different WAN MTU. pfsense uses 1495 as the default for PPPoE connection. I lowered it down to 1400, and speedtest.net shows 1.2Mbps download bandwidth. Then I changed MTU to 1500, and I get 1.3Mbps. Lastly I changed WAN MTU to 1480, and I get the final result, 1.6Mbps! So I guess, for me MTU 14800 should work fine.

Now I have to figure out how to block all those P2P file sharing apps (like BitTorrent and Ares). Any thought?

[Alan87i]

Run the traffic shaper and enable the catch all rule and input the lowest kb speed for up and down that you want.