PFSense high CPU load on Hyper-V

Taxos

Hey all,

Since the latest update I'm experiencing really high CPU load when moving data over the network. When copying files from a machine in the network or over the internet the download speed drops to around 2/3 MBs when this used to 9-10 over WAN and 30-40 over LAN.

It seems hv_event (hyper-v?) and clock are the problem but I don't know why this suddenly changed.
When this happens pfsense responds incredibly slow when using the shell and a command like vmstat takes around 30-60 seconds to complete.

When looking at the hyper-visor (Windows Server 2012 R2) nothing strange appears to be happening. The task manager tells me around 50-60 percent of the CPU is being used even though pfsense should be able to take 100%. Harddisk read/writes and the NIC usage is also really low (running 2 Samsung spinpoint f1's in raid 0 with 1gbit WAN and 1gbit lan).

PFSense is running on synthetic network adapters.

Any help would be appreciated.

System specs:

falumas

I am not having that. I am using the hyper-v core 2012r2.

Are you using any special plugins?

There is now also a new version, which I haven't tried yet. I am using the same version as you are at the moment.

2.2-BETA (amd64)
built on Thu Dec 04 08:10:36 CST 2014

Harvy66

@falumas:

I am not having that. I am using the hyper-v core 2012r2.

Are you using any special plugins?

There is now also a new version, which I haven't tried yet. I am using the same version as you are at the moment.

2.2-BETA (amd64)
built on Thu Dec 04 08:10:36 CST 2014

How are your NICs exposed to PFSense from HyperV? He said he's using "synthetic".

cmb

I'm sure he's using synthetic, the legacy type is really slow at a minimum if not unstable.

Taxos: How much traffic you passing through the system in total when things slow down?

falumas

Yes, I am using the synthetic ones. The one that is simply called "Network Adapter".

Taxos

The problem disappeared after installing the following windows server 2012 R2 november/december updates:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/3013769
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/3000850
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/301340
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/3004394
and updating PFSense to:
2.2-RC (amd64)
built on Thu Dec 11 03:41:41 CST 2014
FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE-p1

I have no extra plugins installed and there was no other traffic going through the system. I did notice that as of today the following message appears in the event log:

Networking driver in PFSense loaded but has a different version from the server. Server version 5.0  Client version 3.2 (Virtual machine ID (machine id)). The device will work, but this is an unsupported configuration. This means that technical support will not be provided until this problem is resolved. To fix this problem, upgrade the integration services. To upgrade, connect to the virtual machine and select Insert Integration Services Setup Disk from the Action menu.

Is it possible to manually update this?

falumas

It is open source so everything is possible to do manually.

It seems though that it doesn't exist any newer driver for freeBSD 10.1. I have installed FreeBSD 10.1 with hyper-v integration services and I still get that message. So I think we need to wait for some more MS and freeBSD magic.

Guest

I got that message back in September too.
It's just a warning that when something goes wrong, you won't receive any support until you upgrade the Gues OS's Integration Services.
Till then, don't worry too much.