Maximum MBUF value?
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Hi guys, new forum member here!
Firstly I must say what a great product pfSense is! I am using it in a production hosted environment in a CARP configuration and at the office.
My production systems are 2 Dell R610's with 2 Xeon X5560's and 48GB RAM each. I am using the 4 on-board Broadcom NIC's and have followed the tuning guide to set the kernel parameter in order to increase the MBUF figure to 131072.
Even though I am currently only at 10% of that number, system throughput is going to increase and increase and I would like to know what theoretical maximum value I can raise this to?
I have done some reading up but no-one seems to have said just how far this value can be pushed. I did read something about the kernel only being able to address 2GB of memory however?
I am running pfSense 2.1.
Cheers
Tom
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I'm not sure about the maximum value for mbufs. You certainly have enough ram that you will hit other bottlenecks long before you run out of ram. I run a configuration similar to yours. I run this:
kern.ipc.nmbclusters="524288"I've never had mbufs be a problem. I have at least one system that hits over 500mbps and over 100kpps. I think as long as you are running an amd64 build of pfSense that addressing your memory should not be a problem. YMMV - packet size, packet rate and number of state changes per second make a big difference in what you can achieve.
netstat -m will be your friend to see if you are having mbuf issues. Shows something like this:
131186/14224/145410 mbufs in use (current/cache/total)
131079/14111/145190/524288 mbuf clusters in use (current/cache/total/max)
131078/12538 mbuf+clusters out of packet secondary zone in use (current/cache)
0/279/279/262144 4k (page size) jumbo clusters in use (current/cache/total/max)
0/0/0/131072 9k jumbo clusters in use (current/cache/total/max)
0/0/0/65536 16k jumbo clusters in use (current/cache/total/max)
294958K/32894K/327852K bytes allocated to network (current/cache/total)
0/0/0 requests for mbufs denied (mbufs/clusters/mbuf+clusters)
0/0/0 requests for jumbo clusters denied (4k/9k/16k)
0/0/0 sfbufs in use (current/peak/max)
0 requests for sfbufs denied
0 requests for sfbufs delayed
0 requests for I/O initiated by sendfile
0 calls to protocol drain routines
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I'm not sure about the maximum value for mbufs. You certainly have enough ram that you will hit other bottlenecks long before you run out of ram. I run a configuration similar to yours. I run this:
kern.ipc.nmbclusters="524288"I've never had mbufs be a problem. I have at least one system that hits over 500mbps and over 100kpps. I think as long as you are running an amd64 build of pfSense that addressing your memory should not be a problem. YMMV - packet size, packet rate and number of state changes per second make a big difference in what you can achieve.
netstat -m will be your friend to see if you are having mbuf issues. Shows something like this:
131186/14224/145410 mbufs in use (current/cache/total)
131079/14111/145190/524288 mbuf clusters in use (current/cache/total/max)
131078/12538 mbuf+clusters out of packet secondary zone in use (current/cache)
0/279/279/262144 4k (page size) jumbo clusters in use (current/cache/total/max)
0/0/0/131072 9k jumbo clusters in use (current/cache/total/max)
0/0/0/65536 16k jumbo clusters in use (current/cache/total/max)
294958K/32894K/327852K bytes allocated to network (current/cache/total)
0/0/0 requests for mbufs denied (mbufs/clusters/mbuf+clusters)
0/0/0 requests for jumbo clusters denied (4k/9k/16k)
0/0/0 sfbufs in use (current/peak/max)
0 requests for sfbufs denied
0 requests for sfbufs delayed
0 requests for I/O initiated by sendfile
0 calls to protocol drain routinesThanks for that info. I just wanted to know if I could increase the max value further if the need ever arose.
Thanks again!
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The upper limit depends on how much RAM you have and how much of that is available as Kernel memory. If you read into FreeBSD's documentation you'll find more in-depth info there, in pages such as tuning(7)
