Performance issues

bruor

I have recently installed PFsense at the office to test our cable internet connection. using a PC directly on the modem yelds us a 15mbit down and 1650kbit up rating from their speedtest site. the same test running through pfsense shows a 1450kbit upstream and a measly 6mbit downstream.

I installed this on a dell optiplex gx270. the LAN nic is em0 and the wan nic is xl0 (hoping the nic type may have something to do with it.)
is there anything i can do to get better performance? is there a best practices/best hardware guide to running pfsense?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

hoba

Does your CPU hit 100% usage while the test is running? Also check if the autonegotiation between the system and the modem was successful (status>interfaces) or if you see lots of collisions or interface errors. Are you using the trafficshaper?

Cry Havok

Are you using 1.2 or 1.0?

Certainly I get the full 20 Mb/s download on my home cable link through my pfSense 1.2 box, despite it using RealTek NICs ;) Others have pushed their boxes to 60 Mb/s:

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,7668.0.html

mhab12

Have you installed any packages, namely the squid package?

bruor

WOW,

thanks for the great suggestions, here is what i have done so far.
i removed the 3com nics and tested with an intel nic. i got a 1Mbit performance increase with the intel nic in polling mode. no increase with the 3coms.

HOWEVER, status -> interfaces shows my lan link at a detected 10Mbit/sec. which is most likely the cause of the issue! didn't even think to check there as i have never had an issue.

I will re-test and post results on this thread with intel vs 3com nics once i get this issue sorted out… It is most likely caused by my company being cheap!

bruor

the switch unfortunately has 10 MBit blades in it, i have stolen a port on one of the 100Mbit blades to continue testing.

Intel NICS: noticed an approx 100kbit/sec drop in speed when turning polling on, i was however using both ports on an intel pro 100 + dual adaptor. perhaps them sharing an IRQ is not the most performant scenario…

3C905cx/onboard intel 865G:
almost a 600kbit/sec increase in speed without polling.
with polling on i noticed an approx 100kbit/sec drop in speed again.

there is no difference in speed at the 15Mbit range between these 2 sets of nics. both seem to perform great when you have the appropriate hardware...

Is polling only meant to increase performance when you have IRQ issues in a system?

Thanks again for everyone's help!

hoba

Polling prevents the system from getting blocked by interrupts. As long as you are not hitting such situations frequently I would not use polling.