PFsense SLow and High CPU

Stewart

You may also want to look at https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=59028.0 to remove those messages from the log and help cut down the noise. Looks like they may not mean anything.

SplineZ

@doktornotor:

@SplineZ:

I have a bit more power behind my box and Ive run into the same thing.. Is powerd on minimum capable of causing this issue?

You need to fiddle with whatever settings are available there. People here mentioned boxes where CPU is never run at full freq unless powerd is enabled somehow. Sure if set @minimum, that's a good candidate.

Interestingly enough, I switched it to adaptive and the overall load on the machine has lowered a HUGE amount. Lets say from 6.0 to under 0.7-0.5.. Kind of ironic that the feature meant to save energy is actually causing an increase… (in this situation)

Seriously, Turn on the profile "minimum" and max out your connection, your load will raise slowly.. turn it to Adaptive and watch it lower almost immediately. "[kernel{em0 taskq}]" is the task using all the cpu..


With "Minimum" power setting on powerd

last pid: 11607;  load averages:  3.36,  1.79,  0.99 
  PID USERNAME      PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE   C   TIME    WCPU COMMAND
    0 root          -92    0     0K   192K CPU0    0 647:46  79.49% [kernel{em0 taskq}]
   12 root          -56    -     0K   272K WAIT    1 432:38  51.46% [intr{swi5: fast taskq}]
87987 root          100   20 25160K  6464K CPU0    0   0:04  26.27% /sbin/pfctl -ss
   11 root          155 ki31     0K    32K RUN     1 390.8H  15.97% [idle{idle: cpu1}]
   11 root          155 ki31     0K    32K RUN     0 385.3H  11.18% [idle{idle: cpu0}]

With "HiAdaptive" power setting on powerd

last pid: 61673;  load averages:  0.53,  1.23,  0.89   
     PID USERNAME      PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE   C   TIME    WCPU COMMAND
   11 root          155 ki31     0K    32K RUN     1 390.9H  97.56% [idle{idle: cpu1}]
   11 root          155 ki31     0K    32K CPU0    0 385.3H  83.98% [idle{idle: cpu0}]
    0 root          -92    0     0K   192K -       0 648:19  10.16% [kernel{em0 taskq}]
   12 root          -56    -     0K   272K WAIT    1 433:00   5.66% [intr{swi5: fast taskq}]
   12 root          -92    -     0K   272K WAIT    1  58:56   0.98% [intr{irq19: em0 uhci1}]
   12 root          -92    -     0K   272K WAIT    0  40:54   0.78% [intr{irq16: re0 uhci3}]

No other changes were made on the machine other then fiddling with the powerd settings.. I never would have thought to look there.. Kudos and thanks!

Harvy66

You're misunderstanding what're being reported. Load is relative. If your CPU is running at 100mhz, then it's not hard to reach 75% usage. The reason "load" is high when using minimum is because the CPU is being down-clocked, you are saving power.