unRAID/pfSense poor download speed, (SOLVED)

[ChaseCares]

Edit: (SOLVED) Apparently it was my NIC. I put in another Express dual-port NIC and it seems to have fixed the issue. I have no idea why, but I'll take it. Thanks for everyone's input.

 

 

Hello, I decided I want to move from my consumer router to a pfSense router and I've been using unraid for a while now so I thought I would create a VM for it. I had no issue setting up and getting pfSense tuned and so far it's been stable for the past few days I've been using it. With only one issue, my download speed is considerably slower. I'm getting 28 Mbps out of pfSense, I would expect us to be closer to 100Mbps, which is what I paid for. When I watch the traffic graph in pfSense it ramps up to 28Mbps and stays there, it's rock solid all the way through the extended test. I feel like it must be something simple that I'm just messing, but I'm out of ideas and I was hoping you guys might be able to help.

    Test setup:

Test 1 Modem>computer (MacBook),

Test 2 Modem>old router>computer (MacBook/Win8.1 VM),

Test 3 Modem>pfSense>computer (MacBook/Win8.1 VM).

 

I tested my speed using three sites: Google speed test, speedtest.net, testmy.net (extended 200MB download only). I've run probably 30 or more tests trying to fix this problem and all the numbers stay about the same.
 
    Results:

Test 1,
Google        35ms, 105Mbps/12Mbps
speedtest.net    32ms, 110Mbps/10.5Mbps
testmy.net    78Mbps/-Mbps (download only)

 

Test 2,
Google        39ms, 95Mbps/10Mbps
speedtest.net    34ms, 102Mbps/9Mbps
testmy.net    74Mbps/-Mbps (download only)

 

Test 3,
Google        35ms, 29Mbps/9Mbps
speedtest.net    36ms, 28Mbps/11Mbps
testmy.net    28.7Mbps/-Mbps (download only)

 

    Hardware:
Everything is gigabits. I tested the switch, adapter (ethernet to USB 3.0 for MacBook) and cables without pfSense, so I feel confident they're good. I'm not using any VLANs, I have the NIC set up with 1 port for WAN and 1 port for LAN. unREID and the windows VM are using the motherboard ethernet port.

 

Motorola SURFboard modem, D-Link 8 Port switch.

unRAID 6.4.0 PC: Mb GA-Z87x-UD5, CPU i7-4790k, Intel dual-port NIC.

pfSense 2.4.2 VM: One CPU pair, so I don't believe it's a CPU bottleneck. When I watch system activity the load averages are less than 1.5 and I've never seen more than 20% CPU usage.
Memory is 2GB, max memory usage I've seen is 10%.

 

    What I've tried,

Reinstall and run vanilla pfSense.
I went through the pfSense doc for low throughput.
Checked everything is running at gigabit full-duplex.
I pulled out and reseated the NIC, I can't move PCI slots unfortunately.
I bought another Intel PCI Express dual-port Nic, I'll try that as soon as I get it.
I tried everything these guys mentioned: https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=57146.0
Along with many other things.

 

Thank you.

Chase

Edited February 7, 2018 by ChaseCares

[DZMM]

Have a look at your system logs and see if anything is getting blocked, particularly DNS - I've been having some problems that seem to have started since 6.4rc1 where DNS lookups are getting blocked intermittently. 

 

I haven't been able to work out why, but when it happens I've added some temporary rules to pass the DNS.  It might be because of my VLAN setup (I'm also using a pfsense VM), but I'm not sure.  I've just rebooted after installing 6.4.1 so I'm monitoring now to see if I still have DNS problems.

 

 

[ChaseCares]

I'll take a look at the logs. I added some local DNS servers and it doesn't seem to have problems resolving websites. I didn't try pfSense before 6.4, I'm curious if that would make a difference.

[mifronte]

Just curious how does that works when you are running your pfSense in a VM on unRAID and have to reboot unRAID.  Does that mean your entire network is down until you can get the pfSense VM up?  Also if pfSense is your DHCP server, aren't you caught in the chicken and egg loop?

[ChaseCares]

Yep. If I reboot, pfSense goes down for a minute, it really doesn't appear to be an issue, considering how fast it boots. unRaid just waits for pfSense to start and then it gets its IP from there, if you don't have a static IP set.

[isvein]

The NIC for PfSense is passthought to the VM?

[ChaseCares]

It's a dual-port NIC and I'm passing the whole card through to pfSense. Here is how the card shows up and I'm passing through [8086:1079]. I followed SpaceInvaderOnes guide and it worked really well for my USB controller, so I did the same thing here.

[ChaseCares]

Edit: (SOLVED) Apparently it was my NIC. I put in another Express dual-port NIC and it seems to have fixed the issue. I have no idea why, but I'll take it. Thanks for everyone's input

Edited February 7, 2018 by ChaseCares