PfSense Intel ET2 Quad (IGB Driver) performance issues

Networking Networking Software
1

Hi there,

I’ve been having a performance problem with my PfSense for a good time now.
Essentially, since I’ve upgraded my Internet service to 1Gbs down/ 200Mbs up, I’ve noticed very poor performance in my PfSense box.
It only manages to do 320Mbs max (more a less), which doesn’t make much sense considering the specs. The CPU is not a work horse but it’s only doing Firewall and routing, nothing else.

My machine specs are:
Asus N3150I-C
Integrated CPU Celeron® N3150 Quad-Core 1.6 GHz (should burst to 2.08 GHz but I’ve never seem it do it with PfSense)
8GB DD3 Ram
120GB Kingston V300 SSD
Intel ET2 Quad port nic

I’ve tried asking for help in the PfSense forums where everyone tells me it should be enough to route 1Gbs but at the same time no one really seem to know what the real issue was.
I’ve tested my Internet connection by connecting directly to the ISP router and I can do regularly 900Mbs download in speedtest.

I feel that it’s the old drivers, but I don’t seem to be able to install the latest provided from Intel following their steps.

It fails on step 3 with error: gzip: can’t stat: igb.4: No such file or directory
And I tried step 4 where it returns: make: “/usr/share/mk/bsd.kmod.mk” line 12: Unable to locate the kernel source tree. Set SYSDIR to override.

Any idea on either what can be causing the performance issue or how can I check the version installed / update to the latest ones?

Thank you,
Ralms

2

Similar box works fine for me on Linux, try it.

3

Can you provide more details?
Stock Linux and installing all software manually?

I’ve been considering highly using Vyos, but the low update cycle kinda pushed me back.

4

Have you tried disabling all the tcp offload stuff in the advanced settings? Or if it’s disabled already try enabling it.

5

Performance without offload is 20-50Mbps on that CPU.

On my N3150 I ran Arch + OpenWRT in a VM, then just Arch, then just Debian upgraded to “testing” (ie. whatever passed the 5 day soak test in unstable – reasonably close to Arch).

6

What performance numbers do you get? Can you saturate a Gigabit line with TCP ?

7

Yes, doesn’t help. This NIC supports it without any problem.