My old setup was:
VSDL modem -> pfsense on mini J1900 Celeron (2 GHz) -> CISCO SG300 10MPP switch -> Rukus R310 wifi -> Laptop
Currnet setup
Fiber model -> pfsense on mini J1900 Celeron (2 GHz) -> CISCO SG300 10MPP switch -> Rukus R310 wifi -> Laptop
Today i got my 1GBit fiber installed (big deal for those like me living in rural areas) only to discover that my current network setup is not allowing me to benefit from it.
I was on VSDL copper wire before and was probably in the region of 50-60 MBit/s with my above current setup. Even when removing the wifi bottle and linking with Cat5 UTP wire directly to switch, I’m not getting major improvements.
When I got the fiber installed this morning I was disappointed when I saw only marginal gain running at 80 MBit/s (c. +30 MBit). So I decided to connect the laptop via LAN cable directly to modem. I got a starkling 900MBit/s. So, along my network I have bottlenecks.
THe first one I tested was my little pfsense machine. I installed the speedtext-cli command and was surprised to find that it was giving my around 300 MBit/s. So a lot better than my laptop on its usual wifi connection but still only 33% of what I get directly off the modem.
So my first question is how can it be that my little mini J1900 Celeron (2 GHz) with 4 GB RAM cannot handle this bandwith? Do I need an upgrade for my pfsense machine? I noticed that the peak CPU demand as speedtest-cli was running was in the 60% region, far from a saturated CPU and RAM only occupied for about 30%. If it is my little pfsense machine, how far do I have to go with finding the right little machine that can handle 1 GBit/s.
The next question is if I’m getting 300 MBit/s on the WAN connection of the pfSense machine, how is it that I only see a small percentage of this on my laptop? i.e. a drop from 300 MBit/s to 80 MBit/s? I guess I would have to test the switch to start and then move to the wifi access points …
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Have you checked all the ethernet links are actually connected at 1G and not 100M?
FYI: Lots of the managed switches or the expensive wifi access points should be able to show the link status in their webinterfaces. It should be pretty easy to figure out if they’re running at 100M. (Sometimes also some LEDs light up in a different color.)
Yes, checked and are all on the 1000M (1G) link
how can it be that my little mini J1900 Celeron (2 GHz) with 4 GB RAM cannot handle this bandwith?
Because it’s ancient, and when it was new it was bottom-of-the-barrel.
I probably didn’t realise how CPU intensive the work of 1Gbit connection must be …
The question is what you do with your pfsense. IDS/IPS are quite CPU hungry and Celerons are not really fast CPU’s.
peak CPU demand as speedtest-cli was running was in the 60% region, far from a saturated CPU and RAM only occupied for about 30%
It doesn’t look like he’s bound by CPU.
And he is currently at 1/3 of the potential speed and 3*60% = 180% CPU load for 1Gbits. So I wouldn’t even bother troubleshooting further when you already know the hardware will be an issue sooner or later.
That assumes that all of the 60% is for pushing packets, which is almost certainly not the case.
True. But since OP is using a benchmark anyways, I don‘t know how close to real world that is. If they are doing lots of filesharing, let‘s say with P2P networks, it could be way worse because of the number of connections. So I agree with you - I was just working with the info I had :)
So my first question is how can it be that my little mini J1900 Celeron (2 GHz) with 4 GB RAM cannot handle this bandwith?
- check ethtool for link speed:
sudo ethtool enp2s0 | egrep 'Speed|Duplex'Your device name may be different fromenp2s0. useip linkto see all devices. if it’s not
Speed: 1000Mb/s Duplex: Fullthen that’s probably a bad sign.
- that is a 10 year old celeron processor. celeron were the budget (a.k.a. cheapest, slowest) class processor at the time. it’s quite likely that it cannot keep up.
- If you still think it’s not CPU directly, use iotop to see if you have I/O bottleneck.
sudo ethtool enp2s0 | egrep ‘Speed|Duplex’
Assuming you mean running these in the command prompt of pfSense? Tried but says “not found”. Same for “ip link”
pfSense is UNIX-based and those commands are generally included with Linux and probably Linux-specific.
Ah, didn’t realize pfSense is the OS, not something that runs on linux. My command examples won’t work for you.
- check ethtool for link speed:
Something to look for besides bandwidth is actual packet routing throughput. It’s possible you enabled a feature (ex. Deep packet inspection) that is limiting how many packets can be routed per second given the speed of your hardware.
What can the network cards support?
Yes, e.g. rpi3b+ has gigabit ethernet, but it’s only 300Mbit, because it’s connected via usb2 internally. Something similar can be the culprit here as well.
Check what drop your get connecting the wifi modem directly to the router. There is usually a massive drop from wired to wifi.
That Pentum is a budget CPU from just over 10 years ago. It has PCIe 2.0. Maybe the “gigabit” ethernet is connected to the CPU by a single 500Mbit PCIe lane.
PCIe 2.0 is 500 MB/s per lane, it’s not going to limit the speed. That CPU certainly doesn’t have enough power to run something heavy like IDS at 1gbps though.
500MB, not Mb. Order of magnitude difference there.
Is the laptop connected to 2.4 or 5 GHz Wirth WiFi? In my setup I never get more than 80 Mbit with 2.4 GHz.
Do yuo have IDP/IPS turned on on pfSense? My OPNsense on my 1Gbps fibre will easily drop from an average of 900Mbps down to around 300Mbps-500Mbps, if I turn on IDS.
I dont’ have IDS/IPS installed on my pfsense box.
Another piece of the puzzle is probably your WiFi router, as you normally won’t get speeds near 1Gbps over WiFi. In order to benefit maximally from it, you need to connect your devices (laptops, stationary PC, TV, etc.) with a cable to get the most of it.
You should also try to disable some pfSense plugins, like OpenVPN, zenArmor, etc. as they will severely limit your bandwidth throughput. But as others said, most likely you will also need to upgrade your hardware box, and you can migrate to OPNsense while at it.
Might be pfsense? My little J1900 box running Ubuntu Server gets 920Mbps.
By the way OP, similar but worse is the ability to handle 25Gbits. But someone made a working router for that as well and CPU was also a factor: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2022-04-23-fiber7-25gbit-upgrade/
I don’t understand why someone would need 25GbE
Because it’s dope.
Also, according to their website the 10 and 25 Gbit/s packages cost the same per month.
Also, still cheaper than my 1 Gbit/s connection.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters AP WiFi Access Point NAT Network Address Translation PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express PoE Power over Ethernet VPN Virtual Private Network
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 11 acronyms.
[Thread #861 for this sub, first seen 9th Jul 2024, 21:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I have been using similar hardware setups in A LOT of installations. This is mostly an issue with the pfSense hardware. There’s a lot of decent options around $200, mostly focus on getting a modern CPU (if it supports AES-NI there’s a good chance it will be fine). A lot of them have 2.5g nics these days too.
Sadly, sg300 line is also getting pretty old. In recent years I’m seeing more and more issues with them, especially in the models with poe. Sg350 is even eos now, with cbs350 being the current.
I’m also now using r610 as the absolute minimum ruckus ap. I was using r510 for a long time, but the r610 has noticable improvements.
Any thoughts on a good little fanless device that I can use as a pfSense machine that has a resonable CPU. I would just swap the SSD from my curent device to the new one and it should all work nicely.
For what it’s worth, since it sounds like you will be hardware shopping soon: I am using a 2.4GHz Intel Atom C2758 running pfSense and get 2Gb/s down and around 1.5Gb/s up through it. I am using an add-on Intel-based PCIe network adapter, so I’m not sure if that is helping with the CPU load. But it works well.
Any more specific recomendation of the machine you have running?
