1000M drops to 100M after a few minutes

[morriscey]

Hello folks,

I'm running OPNsense 22.7.9_3-amd64
FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p5
OpenSSL 1.1.1s 1 Nov 2022

On a mini PC with a celeron CPU J3455 and 4GB ram.  It has two realtek nics.

When I install the realtek driver and reboot I get gigabit on both LAN and WAN. Confirmed working as I get a speed test result on wifi of 300mbps.

Soon after though the link speed drops to 100mbps. Reboot does not fix it. confirmed link speed
uninstall / reinstall driver works. confirmed link speed. Forcing link speed does not work, drops back to 100m.

Wan doesn't drop speed. I swapped ports, no difference, same behaviour.   

Managed switch connected to LAN port does NOT change link speed when connected to ISP router.

I'm quite new to OPNsense and any insight on what to do to keep it pinned at a gigabit would be appreciated.

Thank you

[bartjsmit]

Have you replaced the cable? Is the current one old and/or home made?

Get a cotton bud with some contact fluid and sparingly rub the contacts on the NIC's. Look for bent or broken fingers.

Nothing above layer 0 behaves like you described - you have an electro-mechanical issue  :)

Bart...

[WN1X]

Realtek NICs are not very good, especially when running FreeBSD. Replace with a decent Intel NIC and your problems should go away.

[Vilhonator]

Make sure you have CAT 5 or higher ethernet cable, the connectors on the cable are solid (they don't come off by gently pulling them out) and the cables aren't long enough to get twisted.

Also check if there's any dust or dirt on the ethernet ports (including your PC) and swipe them with alcohol.

Things like cable being long enough to get tangled up or twisted from dirt and dust are most common cause for this type of issue, if it would be NIC or Driver, you wouldn't be able to get 1 gigabit connection even for a second, except if there is some function not working properly with your NIC (for example IPS/IDS or VLAN Hardware Filtering), in which case turning it off should fix that.

Don't know why people always recommend switching NIC everytime it's not Intel, I have use old realtek NIC for about 3 years now, and I get clean 1 gigabit connection without any problems.

[Vilhonator]

Make sure you have CAT 5 or higher ethernet cable, the connectors on the cable are solid (they don't come off by gently pulling them out) and the cables aren't long enough to get twisted.

Also check if there's any dust or dirt on the ethernet ports (including your PC) and swipe them with alcohol.

Things like cable being long enough to get tangled up or twisted, dirt and dust on the ports are most common cause for this type of issue, if it would be NIC or Driver, you wouldn't be able to get 1 gigabit connection even for a second, except if there is some function not working properly with your NIC (for example IPS/IDS or VLAN Hardware Filtering), in which case turning it off should fix that.

Don't know why people always recommend switching NIC everytime it's not Intel, I have use old realtek NIC for about 3 years now, and I get clean 1 gigabit connection without any problems.

In addition check the type of NIC you have, for example VLAN on NIC without VLAN trunk support (IEE 802.1q) can cause issues as well, they do still work in general terms, but assigning VLANs can slow them down

[ryp43]

Hi! I think I know what you are talking about. I have apu2 with the very same specs as you.

Just seconds after reboot I run a speed test and can get up to 800Mbps, a couple of minutes later it drops to ~200-300Mbps max.

I understood that if I disable the Shaper, which was helpful when I had a VSDL connection, the speed stays in the 800Mbps range.

      Server: Active Cloud - XXXXXXXXXX
         ISP: XXXXXXXXX
Idle Latency:     3.95 ms   (jitter: 0.19ms, low: 3.81ms, high: 4.10ms)
    Download:   816.02 Mbps (data used: 1.2 GB)
                 10.18 ms   (jitter: 9.49ms, low: 3.70ms, high: 235.02ms)
      Upload:    84.49 Mbps (data used: 100.5 MB)
                 27.24 ms   (jitter: 6.91ms, low: 5.67ms, high: 88.46ms)
Packet Loss:     0.0%

suggest checking if this is your case.

Have a nice day!

[morriscey]

Have you replaced the cable? Is the current one old and/or home made?

I haven't yet replaced it, it's probably 5 years old, and home made.  I have tested it with a cable tester, and on the ISP combo device it stays at 1gig.   I'll try cleaning everything, re-terminating, and replacing if need be. TY.

Realtek NICs are not very good, especially when running FreeBSD. Replace with a decent Intel NIC and your problems should go away.

Mini PC, so can't really replace them

Just seconds after reboot I run a speed test and can get up to 800Mbps, a couple of minutes later it drops to ~200-300Mbps max.

Thank you for the suggestion but I don't think this is the case.  My link speed changes from "gigabit" to "fast".
Could very well be a physical issue.

Thank you all for the suggestions.

[deadeye244]

Sorry for revisiting this, but I had this very issue with speed dropping from 1000 to 100 every week or so. I changed ethernet cables and have not had the issue in 9 months. So this is very likely the root cause and easy to check.

A cable checker may not catch the issue if its intermittent, like something is loose. But you could try wiggling in your cable checker to see if you can make it go bad.