Issue with CPU load reported on Guest Vs ESXI Host

Deadringers

Noebas and Deadringers,

What versions of pfSense and ESXi are you running?

How many vCPUs did you allocate to pfSense?

Hi there,

I am running esxi 5.1 and the latest stable PFsense build 2.0.3.

And I have 1 vCPU assigned to pfsense with 2 cores.

Noebas

The hosting is running on ESXi, 5.0.0, 1117897

Deadringers

@Noebas:

I have Pfsense 2.0.3 running om ESXi 5, build xxxx this is a cloud server so build is unknow.
1cpu and 1 GB ram

I also have a test setup running on ESXi 5.1.0 build 799733, on this setup the problem is not there and the cpu is normal.
Almost the same vlan setup.

I have been looking a the differences between the two but so far no luck.

Using the same version of ESXI as you are mate.

Noebas

OK but my 5.1 test setup is doing fine. The 5.0 not.

Noebas

This post seems to be the same issue : http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1742250&page=2

I am willing to do any testing but this seems to be a bug in pfsense 2.x, as M0n0wall, also freebsd based, is not having this issue.
This is making pfsense 2.x unusable for us so i have to go back to 1.2.3 or some other solution.

Deadringers

Can one of the admins comment on this or give me something to try?

I am downloading a file at about 70 mbps right now and my PFsense box is reporting about 10% CPU usage for "system"

However the idle usage is on 82% and ESXI is reporting my PFsense box is using up a huge amount of CPU.

madmax14304

I'm having this same issue. Is it safe to assume that nobody has found the root cause?

Deadringers

@madmax14304:

I'm having this same issue. Is it safe to assume that nobody has found the root cause?

In a word… No!

I have my suspicions that esxi is reporting high cpu because it is using a lot of cpu to just pass the traffic / packets but the router is fine as it sees it's nics as just nics and not a cpu.

The performance is fine for me right now with a 80 down 20 up connection.

madmax14304

I just did a test. On my pfsense VM have 1 dual core vCPU and 2 vNICs. One is for WAN and one is for LAN (both are setup as e1000 cards). Normally if I go onto the pfsense VM and do top -SH, I see 50% System CPU usage. {idle: cpu1} is consistent 65% {idle: cpu2} is consistent 35%.

I removed all vNICs and setup one of my physical PRO1000 intel adapters for PCI passthrough. I added this one PCI adapter to my pfsense VM. So it had NO vNICs at all. I configured pfsense for em0 as LAN and em_vlan50 as my WAN (WAN is on vlan 50).
End result: NO IMPROVEMENT
{idle: cpu1} is consistent 50% {idle: cpu2} is consistent 50%.
The system was still 50% utilized and uses 2600MHz on my esxi host. I do use pfsense as an OpenVPN client. not sure if that factors in. Still, no other processes on pfsense use hardly any cpu. Looks like all system overhead. Also, I'm on esxi 5.0 Update 2 because 5.1 broke all kinds of support for PCI passthrough.

madmax14304

OK, I think my issue has been solved. I downloaded the ova for pfsense and did a vanilla install with no packages. I didn't see any CPU usage issues so I started comparing settings to my high CPU install and found one option that somehow got turned on at some point.

System–>Advanced
Enable device polling was checked on

I disabled it and as soon as I did I started getting watchdog errors. I logged onto the pfsense console and rebooted the VM. After reboot, my CPU usage went from 2600MHz to a mere 138MHz. Hopefully some of you have the same option enabled. Not sure how it got turned on.