Speed Limited to 16,3MBytes/s with P4 Hardware

rsauvat_inet

Hello,

I have installed pfSence 2.0.3 on old hardware to serve as a firewall router for a 10 person office.
I have a 200Mbits/s symmetric fibre connexion but when I try to download files from the internet I am always limited to 16,3MBytes/s or 132Mbits/s.

I tried to download directly on pfSense and I get 27MBytes/s which seams to be my internet connexion limit. I have no idea what is causing the bottleneck on the pfSense box.

I only have the pfBlocker package, I have disable and removed all traffic shaping. I do the tests directly behind the pfsense (no switch nor wifi).

Here is the hardware description :

Intel Pentium 4 @3,0GHz
1GB RAM
2x PCI NIC RTL8169/8110 Gigabit Ethernet

Even with the PCI limit of 133MB/s for both cards I don't think it is the issue here. 30MB/s x2 = 60MB/s < 133MB/s
But I may be wrong. Maybe there is something specific about the P4 platform.

Any hints about this issue are welcome. Anyone got experience with pfsense with P4?

Regards

tirsojrp

Get Intel NICs

stephenw10

I can get much better than that on a 1.2GHz P4-M using Intel Gigabit NICs.

Is that CPU hyperthreading? I assume it is, try disabling that.
What does 'top -SH' show when you are trying to push the maximum throughput?

Steve

arch113

@stephenw10:

I can get much better than that on a 1.2GHz P4-M using Intel Gigabit NICs.

Is that CPU hyperthreading? I assume it is, try disabling that.
What does 'top -SH' show when you are trying to push the maximum throughput?

Steve

Will hyperthreading slow it down on a older single core P4 cpu?

stephenw10

I'm not sure but it's easy to try so why not. ;) It used to be common FreeBSD thinking that disabling hyperthreading would usually speed up the machine. Less so more recently but that's an old box. By running two threads in a single core you reduce the maximum single thread speed due to overheads, thread switching etc. Since the main firewall process, pf, is single threaded this could come into play.

Steve

rsauvat_inet

Thanks for the replies,

How can I disable hyperthreading? in BIOS settings?

Here is the top command when I tried pushing throughput.


last pid: 54889;  load averages:  0.06,  0.03,  0.00                                                                                                                                                                                                    up 0+20:03:49  16:20:41
87 processes:  4 running, 71 sleeping, 12 waiting
CPU:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system, 28.9% interrupt, 71.1% idle
Mem: 37M Active, 13M Inact, 57M Wired, 756K Cache, 30M Buf, 1363M Free
Swap: 4096M Total, 4096M Free

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE   C   TIME   WCPU COMMAND
   11 root     171 ki31     0K    16K RUN     1  19.9H 100.00% {idle: cpu1}
   12 root     -28    -     0K   104K CPU0    0  24:13 61.28% {swi5: +}                                                                                                                                                                                                            11 root     171 ki31     0K    16K RUN     0  19.3H 42.29% {idle: cpu0}
   12 root     -32    -     0K   104K WAIT    0  14:40  0.39% {swi4: clock}                                                                                                                                                                                                     
   14 root      44    -     0K     8K -       1   1:14  0.00% yarrow                                                                                                                                                                                                              244 root      76   20  3348K  1184K kqread  1   0:59  0.00% check_reload_status                                                                                                                                                                                               
    0 root      44    0     0K    48K sched   1   0:43  0.00% {swapper}
30090 root      44    0  5076K  3172K select  1   0:23  0.00% openvpn

pfsense_top.txt
pfsense_top.txt

robi

Yes, in BIOS.

stephenw10

Is that 'top' or 'top -SH'?

Either way you've one virtual core doing nothing at all and the other one with plenty of spare cycles. Your CPU is not the throttle point in this system. I would suspect the NICs after that. Also make sure whatever you're testing with is capable of sending/receiving the required (or well in excess of) bandwidth. I've been caught by that before.

Steve

rsauvat_inet

This was 'top -SH' .

I didn't had the chance to try without HT yet.

For the testing system, it's working fine as I tried to push the throughput of my local gigabits switches and I got a transfer rate of 112MB/s with wget. That's how I found the bottleneck was the pfsense box.

For the NICs, is there other drivers to try?

stephenw10

You can try a 2.1 snapshot which has newer drivers. However if the NICs are a similar age to the rest of your system it's unlikely to make much difference. :-\

Steve

stryfe

I'm getting a P4 box tomorrow from my work I hope.. I have a 105Mbit connection I'll probably be doing some testing and report back my results.. Is the 200Mbit split between the 2 nics? If that's the case then I don't see where their be a problem.. Unless like previous posted it's the cards themselves.. And you could get a dual-gigabit intel nic and see how that does..