PfSense Captive portal slow

[William Thomas]

Hi everyone,

I setup my first pfSense and all went well with the initial setup.  Now I am enabling the captive portal and it goes well(I think).

In testing, I am able to authenticate.  The problem is that any connected user via captive portal is dreadfully slow with the internet speed.  THe connection speed goes from 2Mbps to like 5kbps.  A page such as Amazon.com that usually loads in under 5 seconds takes up to 2 minutes to load.  When I disable the captive portal, internet speed returns.

Can anyone help me understand the cause?  Here are the specs of the system I have in place. A Buffalo router(routing/dhcp disabled) with the LAN port connected to Re1, Re0 is connected to my ISP

[cmb]

You put a bandwidth limit on your portal? A very low bandwidth limit is the only reasoning I can think of for that.

[William Thomas]

Thanks for the reply.  I have left the fields blank.  I assume this would mean unlimited bandwidth, correct?

Oh also, when I enable the Captive portal, all traffic is blocked except for the browser that authenticated.  When I disable the captive portal all traffic is then allowed.  I noticed this when my team viewer connection was lost until I disabled the Captive portal service.

I thought that once authentication was permitted, al traffic is allowed for the session, no?

Now, if I was to set this, is 500Kbps a decent download speed with a 50Kbps upload?

[William Thomas]

I figured it out, I think.

When I disabled the peruser bandwidth allocation, speed was down to about 2Kbps.  When I enabled bandwidth allocation and set speed to to 6000Kbps, speeds returned.

It's just strange I have to do this but I guess it is now working :)

[dzany]

Hi,

Here is mentioned that I have enabled such a setting, but I never did, neither think about enbaling it. It just started limiting our users. Please investigate this. This bug should not be closed, as it is bug, quite hard to find, when you don't know what are you looking for. Proof for that is that limits where 5 MBps and 2,5 MBps and those are default values.

https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/3651#change-13905

[William Thomas]

Thanks, I see this was closed a not a bug.  I have another pfSense system to install and I will see if I get this issue as well.