It's both interesting and annoying how well a system can work with slightly defective RAM. I got a used PC from a buddy (who is unlikely to fake it) and it had a RAM error that would only manifest in memtest86+ at around the 5th pass, and only in test #8, who never noticed any problems, even when specifically asked about it. That's why one successful memtest run is just a starting point and a complete build is being left to test for as long as possible but never less than 24 hours total (might interleave some installation or other use), even longer (up to 1 week continuous) if it's going to be used for anything important like a server of any sort. none of this helps if the defect manifests only after a year of use, which is why I'd like OPNSense (or rather: every appliance OS) to have some sort of lightweight user-mode background testing service.
Quote from: moonman on August 18, 2026, 01:25:56 AMcompare CPU load on rtl8127. Copying single 50GB file from the unraid server (with AQC113 NIC) throughput was all over the place from 900 MB(yte)/s to 1.10GB/s with one core maxed out. I put the AQC113 NIC back in and got a stable smooth throughput at 1.09GB/s and none of the cores were maxed out. I did play with different settings including settings RSS queues from 8 to 4, but none helped. Is it a driver issue? maybeProbably a driver issue, as I was able to get the IRQ load to spread across CPUs on my puny RTL8111 NIC only after much tinkering with the tunables. It's odd that the Windows driver would be just as crappy as the BSD one (even the vendor driver would not do it by itself), especially with much more recent hardware. However, my MoBo had stability issues with MSI-X that had to be resolved through firmware updates, so possibly the driver is just being conservative. May also be a limitation of the OS / networking stack that ties one stream of data to one CPU unless the driver counteracts it. Multiple concurrent streams tend to spread over cores much more readily than a single stream from what little I've looked at.
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