Re: net5501: FreeBSD ipfw and the elusive 75Mbps throughput

Thanks for the replies so far.  Looks like I’ll have to wait until Saturday to test further. Starting with an L2 bridge seems like a good baseline to try.  Although will probably take the easier step of just NAT w/o rules first.  Switching to pfsense or a 6501 were already further down my option list, so agree with those.  

Had not considered just a change to pf, but will mull over.  Although if I’m going to learn a new syntax, might as well get the pretty interface to go with it (pfsense) assuming I can get the performance.  

With the current set up, I ran top during the download.  Never got lower than 25% idle time on the CPU.  ~30% system and and 40+% interrupt.  384M (of 512M) Free on memory, so no issue there.  So doesn’t seem to be pegging the CPU with my full rule set.  

-Jed

On Jun 8, 2016, at 8:18 PM, Jed Clear <[email protected]> wrote:

> I just climbed out of the bronze age of home networking (DSL) and now have "75Mbps service” from $BIG_CABLE_CO (iron age?).  Before the DSL was the bottle neck.  Now it appears the 5501 is the bottle neck.  My net5501-70 has long been running nanobsd (FreeBSD 9.3-R) and ipfw as my perimeter router-firewall-nat.  While I’m not expecting 75, especially in the evening, it’s not even close.  Note all the speeds mentioned are download speeds in Mbps.  The upload is much worse, but not bothered by that in this exercise.
> 
> When the cable modem was first brought up, a laptop directly on it pulled 56 with one of the speed test sites.  The cable modem channel power and SNR don’t look bad.  Putting the 5501 in-line dropped the speed to the 30s.  Some googling later and I discover FreeBSD’s polling feature.  So I added options DEVICE_POLLING to the kernel config (HZ was already 1000), baked a new image, set all the interfaces to polling and … it dropped like a rock to 5 Mbps.  Flipping off polling on the three interfaces brought it back to the 30s.  
> 
> I tried the built in “simple” firewall rule set, and that did modestly better than my, perhaps overly complicated, rule set.  It got around 44.  I will work that later.
> 
> Anyway I’m a bit baffled by the negative results when enabling polling.  And any other advice on improving the performance through the 5501 would be appreciated.  I haven’t given up on self help, but need a break from google for a bit so will appeal to the collective wisdom of soekris-tech.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -Jed
> 
> PS: To add insult to injury, I just repeated the directly connected laptop experiment and clocked over 90.  :-(
> 
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