Thanks for the replies so far.  Looks like I’ll have to wait until Saturday to 
test further. Starting with an L2 bridge seems like a good baseline to try.  
Although will probably take the easier step of just NAT w/o rules first.  
Switching to pfsense or a 6501 were already further down my option list, so 
agree with those.  

Had not considered just a change to pf, but will mull over.  Although if I’m 
going to learn a new syntax, might as well get the pretty interface to go with 
it (pfsense) assuming I can get the performance.  

With the current set up, I ran top during the download.  Never got lower than 
25% idle time on the CPU.  ~30% system and and 40+% interrupt.  384M (of 512M) 
Free on memory, so no issue there.  So doesn’t seem to be pegging the CPU with 
my full rule set.  

-Jed

On Jun 8, 2016, at 8:18 PM, Jed Clear <[email protected]> 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.  :-(
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Soekris-tech mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
> 

_______________________________________________
Soekris-tech mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech

Reply via email to