Total Bandwidth Limit in Captive Portal?
-
Hello Everyone,
I currently have a property that has a PfSense server running on a Dell Poweredge R210. They typically get very high usage (300 users in Captive Portal is not uncommon)
The issue is this:
So some reason, regardless of how many people are in captive portal, the bandwidth usage never exceeds 25Mb/s. The Property has a 100Mb/s circuit from a local carrier.
If you are MAC Filtered around Captive Portal with no Upload and Download limit, you are able to use roughly 70Mb/s. When connected Directly to the modem, you are able to get speeds of up to 80Mb/s
Is there some kind of physical limit of bandwidth within captive portal? Not talking client limits, I mean for the entire captiveportal. Is it only allowed to pass so much traffic?
Any help would be awesome!
/Esink
-
There isn't such a limit that I'm aware of.
Have you watched the CPU usage from the console (top -SH) or Diag > System Activity when this happens?
Using CP will activate another layer of filtering (ipfw) so it could be using more resources, resulting in an overall performance reduction. However, I haven't seen it be that dramatic before. From ~80 to ~25 is a large drop.
-
The CPU usage in the box is normal The highest I've seen it (even during peak usage) is 35-40%
-
That really tells you nothing. If you have a quad core box (or dual core with HT) 25% cpu usage could be doing 100% on one core and be a bottleneck.
Seeing the top -SH output gives you a clearer picture about what is actually using those resources.
-
Here is the output of top -SH from a few hours before heavy utilization. I will post another during peak utilization
$ top -SH
last pid: 26657; load averages: 0.06, 0.04, 0.01 up 27+06:26:31 14:14:06
105 processes: 3 running, 85 sleeping, 17 waitingMem: 434M Active, 36M Inact, 123M Wired, 972K Cache, 46M Buf, 2393M Free
Swap: 8192M Total, 8192M FreePID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND
11 root 171 ki31 0K 16K CPU1 1 624.4H 99.37% {idle: cpu1}
11 root 171 ki31 0K 16K RUN 0 616.4H 98.97% {idle: cpu0}
12 root -68 - 0K 136K WAIT 1 409:29 0.88% {irq257: bce1}
12 root -68 - 0K 136K WAIT 0 470:10 0.59% {irq256: bce0}
7255 root 56 0 54764K 17504K accept 0 0:04 0.10% php
0 root -68 0 0K 56K - 1 302:02 0.00% {dummynet}
12 root -32 - 0K 136K WAIT 0 142:51 0.00% {swi4: clock}
15569 root 44 0 308M 305M bpf 0 76:24 0.00% tcpdump
14 root 44 - 0K 8K - 0 43:31 0.00% yarrow
20782 root 44 0 5116K 3236K select 0 32:01 0.00% openvpn
40867 nobody 44 0 6580K 3764K select 1 27:08 0.00% dnsmasq
15406 root 44 0 4948K 2540K select 1 24:32 0.00% syslogd
37705 root 44 0 62920K 56756K kqread 0 18:44 0.00% lighttpd
15721 root 44 0 3316K 924K piperd 0 12:15 0.00% logger
34014 root 64 20 3316K 1348K select 1 7:58 0.00% apinger
8 root 44 - 0K 8K pftm 0 5:43 0.00% pfpurge
39181 dhcpd 44 0 8436K 5796K select 0 3:57 0.00% dhcpd
17116 root 76 20 3656K 1464K wait 1 2:24 0.00% sh