I installed and configured PfSense this weekend. Moved my whole network over to it, replacing an older hardware firewall that’s long out of support. Everything seems to work great. Speedtest show my full speed, steam downloads games at what I expect given I am gigabit networking all the way to the modem. Amazon video works great, Sportsnet works great, Netflix, Disney, Twitch, all perfect. The issue I have run into is 5 out of 5 devices I tested can’t talk to YouTube video servers reliably. Desktop PC Running windows 11, Imac running Monterey, Laptop running windows 11, Note 9 and moto g stylus. All have the same issue where videos don’t load reliably, won’t buffer often and video are very slow or unable to download via premium downloads.
What I Have Tried
-I have tried rebooting the PfSense multiple times, and restarted ISPs modem.
-Disabled all ipv6 on bot it and my desktop as my ISP doesn’t play nice with v6 aparently and I am not really setup for it.
-I have tried pointing my desktop at my locale windows 2019 DNS server, the PfSense which points at ISPs DNS, 1.1.1.1,8.8.8.8,4.2.2.2 for DNS with a flush in between every time.
-I have tried with chrome and edge on the computers and The YouTube app on the phones.
-Tried on a mix of Wifi and wired.
-Addblock disabled or not present on all devices.
-checked PfSense for any kind of ad blocking but doesn’t seem there is unless you install an extra package.
What worked.
So far the only thing that can get youtube working as it was before is if I run a vpn on my desktop.
If anyone has seen this kind of issue before or has any ideas, I would love to know as I am at a complete loss.
@TikTok First: Are you running any addons like pfblocker or snort? If you are, disable them and then test again.
Second: Are you using a home internet connection or business. WAN DHCP or Static? Does your ISP support IPv6 on the WAN side?
Third, what are the NICs you are currently using in the pfsense build? There is a known issue with 2.7 and Realtek NICs. If that is the case, buy some cheap Intel NICs and replace them.
Open developer tools in your browser on youtube (e.g. ctrl+shift+j) and you should be able to see network requests going back and forth, with all the timing info attached for the entire page and all the video contents.
If you then, in parallel to that, happen to be running wireshark, you should be able to see all the network packets transmitted and received.
You can save those requests / responses.
If you do the same thing while on a VPN, you should be able to compare how things look like when they’re fast, … with how they look like when they’re slow.
My bet: QUIC (working over UDP 443) is having issues with MTU discovery, but browser debugging network tab + wireshark will let you know for sure.
I am running no addons, like I said in the post. No addblockers are present on the PfSense system. Home internet with DHCP ipv4 wan. I am not sure if my ISP supports ipv6 but I do not use it currently on my lan at all and it is disabled in PfSense. I am using a Realtek NIC…or I was but I just changed to an intel NIC for the wan and it seems to be fixed. It makes NO SENSE WHAT SO EVER that “issues” with Realtek NIC would cause issues for a single service.
I am not using Realtek nics for everything except wan and everything seems fine and is working well but I will probably move as much as I can to Intel nics just to be safe.
@TikTok Realtek NICs are known issues under FreeBSD which is what pfsense is built on as well as some versions of Linux.
Realtek NICs are budget NICs that are mostly reliant on CPU software acceleration via their driver and while they are okay for normal average desktop use in Windows. Using them as network interface NICs for servers or network appliances is never really suggested due to their sub-par performance and other janky issues.