APU1D4, Performance Tuning

[Dean E. Weimer]

Does Anyone have an APU1D4, that's able to pull greater than 30Mbits throughput on it? I have a 60Mbits download speed, but can't get over 30Mbits no matter what settings I change. I am currently running on a Virtual Box installation. So I can do some significant testing, I rebuilt the install, with fresh settings, I have verified cabling is not an issue, ports are negotiating 1000Mbits, with flow control. Both interfaces are tied to a Dell PowerConnect 2724 switch, using VLANS to segregate traffic.

[Zeitkind]

Have the same problem running Linux/IPCop on one. Not sure, but I guess it's those freaky Realtek NIC's and a driver related bug. Mine is doing simple NAT and max the CPU at ~35mbit/s! I gave up after days of tests, never found the reason why.
One solution might be a mini-PCIe-NIC with dual intel NICs, but I never tried.
http://www.winmate.com.tw/IndustrialAuto/IndustrialAutoSpec.asp?Prod=05_0150
http://www.cervoz.com/product.php?id=be7fdcb9-014a-1000-a04b-001851f77c0c
You need a new case and the cards prob. won't fit, so, well..
http://streuspeicher.de/2015/08/building-a-5-port-network-appliance-with-pcengines-apu-1d4-and-pfsense/

But anyway, 30mb is to slow. Did you tried to change the settings for offloading and such?
https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=98900.0

[franco]

For direct reference... System: Settings: Networking:

[ x ] Disable hardware checksum offload
[ x ] Disable hardware TCP segmentation offload
[ x ] Hardware Large Receive Offloading
[ x ] Disable VLAN Hardware Filtering

Some settings may or may not have an impact, but it can't hurt to disable all of them and try where that leads you.

[Dean E. Weimer]

Well after a lot of testing, I have been able to get it to sustain 50-55Mbps, believe it or not, the one thing that helped the most was locking the 1G interfaces at 100 half Duplex. No matter what other settings I tweaked I couldn't beat the 33Mbps mark, until trying this.
I will live with this for now, but looks like I am going to be after some new hardware sometime next year.

[neo243]

so mine runs with 120 mbit/s without any problems
Openvpn about ~40 mbit/s
But i didn't tweaked anything everything standard.

go for
uncheck checksum
check disable tcp offload
check hardware large receive offload
uncheck disable vlan hardware ...

[Dean E. Weimer]

Tried a fresh install, only things that were set was ip addresses, verified ports negotiated 1G full duplex, confirmed on switch that it was seeing 1G full, could only get from 8-9Mbits through put. After some tweaking I was able to get it to 20-28Mbits with interfaces at that speed.
Verified the same with pfSense, almost did a plain FreeBSD install to test with until I discovered by locking the interfaces at 100/half would get me 50-55Mbits.
I don't remember not being able to get the 60Mbits when I first bought it back in April. I am sure I tested it, and would have probably sent it back if throughput wasn't reaching the 60Mbits. If it had later dropped to 20-28 I may not have noticed, until it dropped to the 8-10Mbit downloads were taking forever Youtube buffering, DirecTV on demand couldn't start playing, and I started to investigate.
As these boards run fairly hot compared to the older Alix Boards, I am suspecting that heat over time is degrading the components. But I can't prove that, I can however verify that all the other hardware is working as expected, no networking hardware has been changed since this was installed.

[neo243]

but you use an apu case right?
mine is at Max 60°C for 120 Mbit/s

[jstrebel]

What are the CPU temperature displaying, if you activate them?


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[Dean E. Weimer]

Temp is usually around 58, but ranges from 56-61, case was purchased with the board from netgate.com. Installed Heat sink as per instructions. I have also been working with a thread on the pcengines forum. and my last round of testing, discovered something. I was using re1 for INET, and re2 for LAN, matching names on the case. re0 which is labeled OPT1 on the case was unused. If I take re2 out of the loop, and switch to re0 for LAN the problem goes away. With autodect/flow control enabled I can now get full 60Mbits with interfaces reporting the following.

re0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
        options=8209b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_MAGIC,LINKSTATE>
        ether 00:0d:b9:3a:4e:d8
        inet6 fe80::20d:b9ff:fe3a:4ed8%re0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
        inet 192.168.5.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.5.255
        nd6 options=21<PERFORMNUD,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
        media: Ethernet autoselect <flowcontrol> (1000baseT <full-duplex,flowcontrol,rxpause,txpause>)
        status: active
re1 shows the same except the IP.

[jstrebel]

FYI, my APU with a red ALU enclosure reads from 53-55°C

[aldocorleone]

FYI, running opnsense with fairly default settings and a few NATs, I'm running at 56-58 C.

When I was running pfSense, which had full IPS, more NATs, I was running at 53.