OPNsense Forum

English Forums => Hardware and Performance => Topic started by: Linwood on October 09, 2025, 06:31:32 PM

Title: iperf plugin - testing firewall routing/filtering performance without the NIC's
Post by: Linwood on October 09, 2025, 06:31:32 PM
Testing new firewall hardware with 10g ports, and a bit limited on 10g devices where I can test performance.

I installed the iperf plugin on 25.7.5, plugin version shows 1.0_2.

This is going to sound like a dumb question, but if I create a server (e.g. from the GUI), and then in the shell I run a separate client, what does this do:

# LAN interface is ixl0, 192.168.130.1
# VLAN 136 interface is ixl0_vlan136, address 192.168.136.1  (server created from gui at port 56650)
#
iperf3 -c 192.168.136.1 -p 56550 -t 10 -bind-dev ixl0

I was hoping this would pass traffic through the firewall logic to see if I could load it down, without worrying about NIC speed (I lack enough 10g devices to do a proper test at the moment).

What it does is report traffic passing at 48Gbps but the firewall logs show nothing, so I assume this is taking some shortcut.

Is there a way to force traffic to flow through the firewall portions of opnsense to see if I can load up the processor?

Or do I need actual, physical devices on the two interfaces (and limited to the interface speed)?

Or... put another way, is there a good way to put some stress on a new configuration artificially to make sure things are working well?

I should note that I've got hardware to test at 2.5g and that comes out just shy of 2.5gbps as I would expect.  I don't have anything handy to run linux on both ends at 10g.