Gigabit LAN speeds with pfSense

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Shyne151

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 4, 2003
Messages
465
So in my previous thread(http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1809855) I asked about setting up pfSense and now have everything setup and functioning... except I am no longer seeing the local LAN speeds I was getting before integrating pfSense.

Before I was pulling 600-700Mbit between my media server and desktop on the LAN. Both are hardwired with gigabit cards operating in full duplex. Now I'm getting about half of that. Being the network n00b that I am... is the traffic somehow going out to the pfSense box and then back into the switch? It seems like since the speed has literally been cut in half that this would make since? since there is one gigabit card that would be handling the traffic?

Setup:
- pfSense - Intel Dual gigabit NIC.... one port WAN and one port LAN
- LAN - wndr3700 in access point mode. ~ previously had dd-wrt setup... now back to stock firmware, no difference.
- DHCP - distribued by pfSense box

Any ideas? I guess I could monitor the traffic going thru the pfSense LAN port to see if traffic is being routed thru it for LAN.

Thanks for the help guys!
 
not unless you're doing some fancy VLAN stuff, which it doesn't look like you are...

traffic between clients on the same subnet like that is generally a function of the switch... sounds like your switch isn't handling the speed...

also, it depends on what you were pulling too across the machines... were you actually running something like iperf? or just trying to copy some files off a hard disk...
 
goodcooper said:
not unless you're doing some fancy VLAN stuff, which it doesn't look like you are...

traffic between clients on the same subnet like that is generally a function of the switch... sounds like your switch isn't handling the speed...

also, it depends on what you were pulling too across the machines... were you actually running something like iperf? or just trying to copy some files off a hard disk...
Click to expand...

I have not tried iperf yet. I have a cifs mount on my linux media server that mounts a shared folder off my Windows machine. I used dd to create a 10GB file used a mv command to move between the two machines via the mount. I did do some tweaks to cifs at one point now that I think about it... hmm I think I'm going to setup iperf later just to make sure it's not a cifs issue. I've also tried SFTP... and get similar speeds... I wouldn't think the encryption for SFTP has that much over head? It definitely doesn't peg the processor at all.

*edit* I am using iftop on the linux server to monitor the transfer speed.
 
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issue shouldn't be pfsense. it is either the switch or one of the host you are transferring files to/from. You can easily verify if you start up the transfer then disconnect the pfsense box. Your traffic should still continue without it. If it is the pfsense box then your speed should go up. But im pretty sure you won't see a speed change when removing the pfsense box.
 
yea, once you get your address from DHCP and your DNS cached you could just unplug it... that would be an excellent test...
 
^^ Definitely didn't think about disconnecting pfSense after dhcp was acquired. Thanks guys! I'll give it a whirl tonight.
 
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