I would try with a simple l2 bridge set up across two of the interfaces,
run your tests and see if the cpu on the soekris is pegged.

If it is, then the network driver is likely the bottleneck. Depending on
the driver there might be some tunables available via sysctl.

If not (if cpu is moderately loaded and throughput is good) then it is
the ipfw framework.  Have you experimented at all with pf?



On 2016-06-08 8:18 PM, Jed Clear 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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