ixl driver out of date and slowing down throughput

[Mitzsch]

Hello everyone,

I have a performance issue with my X710. I installed OPNsense 21.1.x which uses a quite outdated ixl iflib driver (2.1.0k) on my dell r330 (E3 1230v5 - 16gb RAM) and ran an iperf test. (setup below) The results were pretty low for what I´ve expected. => 4.52 Gbps In another console, I monitored the cpu utilization with top -aSH. There was one wcpu pegged at 100% with a process [kernel{if_io_tqg_2}]. Presumably something wrong with interrupts and therefore slowing down the test. Just for testing purposes, I´ve tried pfsense 2.5 (lol) with their freebsd 12.2 kernel and a newer ixl iflib driver (2.3.0k). iperf => 10 Gbps! --- with the same [kernel{if_io_tqg_x}] process with a slightly lower CPU usage. Is there something I cloud do or should I just wait for the opnsense devs to update to the newest (upstream) ixl driver?

Code Select Expand

[Linux PC1 - iperf client] <---"LAN - 10g"---> [OPNsense] <---"WAN - 10g"---> [Linux PC2 - iperf server]

[mimugmail]

Is this a default install without stuff like netflow, Sensei, IPS? Do you watch Traffic stats during the test?

[Mitzsch]

yes, basically a default install - only netflow enabled but no suricata running nor is sensei installed. I will try with netflow disabled. Is netflow so resource-hungry?

[mimugmail]

Sure, it dumps every traffic going over the Interface so you have stats per IP and port

[Mitzsch]

okay, well I tried with netflow disabled and indeed it improved performance. Going from 4.5 Gbps to 6.0 Gbps but still "far" from 10g. Something I also noticed is when I head over to the "Traffic Graphs" tab while the iperf test is running throughput drops to about 5.5 Gbps but strangely having a traffic graph widget on the dashboard does nothing. (tried with it being there and not being there - no change). Also, the dropped package count in iperf is relatively high compared to the same test done with pfsense.

[franco]

Driver update will be in 21.7: https://github.com/opnsense/src/commit/7f99911763


Cheers,
Franco