New install starts to have trouble with new IP connections. Tons of resources.

[nchitechredneck]

This is driving me absolutely crazy. I had an install of OPNsense on an old PC for a while but it started having HW issues. Storage was going bad. I figured I'd rebuild on a new system so went way overkill with Minisforum MS-01. Put in 32GB of RAM and a 1TB NVMe. Which should mean this isn't some hardware constraint. And the old system was fine with less.

New install of 24.1.7. Have ZenArmor in Bypass for testing. No IDS enabled. Both LAN and WAN are Intel i226 2.5Gb NICs. The system runs great for a couple of hours but then begins to have trouble with new connections. For example, speedtest.net. After a while speedtest.net tests get real flakey. They might work for the download test...but not the upload. They'll fail partway through a test. After a while the test can't establish new connections to run at all. Other apps start slowing down on connections. Eventually they either retry long enough or they time out. Downloads from Xbox Game Pass, for example.

It appears like the state table is filling up. If I load up two torrent clients with a lot of things connected this symptom pops up much faster than if I don't. My state table is under 1% utilization. MBUF is at 1%. CPU is in single digits all day.

Thoughts?

[nchitechredneck]

More testing. If I run the torrent clients and it slows down I can kill the clients to fix it. I just went from not being able to run speedtest to it running fine again right after killing the clients.

So some table or memory or something appears to be filling up when it shouldn't.

[Seimus]

So when you run torrents you always see this issue?
And when torrents are disabled than you have no problems?

If the state table would increase or MBUF or Memory/SWAP you would see it directly on the dashboard.

When you have this issue you mainly focus on the Internet Connectivity, but how is the LAN or InterVLAN connectivity?
Can you still connect to OPN or any other device that is only on the LAN?
Does this affect as well LAN or only WAN related connections?
What is your WAN BW DOWN/UP?

Regards,
S.

[nchitechredneck]

Yes. Torrents usually cause the symptom. I assume it's due to the thousands of connections that get opened.
Yes. If the connection symptoms start I can close the BT clients and it goes away.


Agreed. My MBUF and State Table percentages are very low single digit.


My network is flat right now. The firewall is just internal/external. No inter-VLAN routing.
Yes. Management on the OPNsense UI isn't impacted.
Gb Fiber. Symmetrical.


And now an update. I think it's a NIC chipset issue. I was going nuts and was looking at what worked on my last HW setup and this one. Both Intel CPUs and motherboard chipsets. Both with Intel NICs...but the old box had a X550-T2 card in it and this MS-01 uses the i226 2.5Gb chipset for the copper ports. I took the X550 out of the old box and put it in the MS-01 and moved my LAN/WAN connections.


It's been running just fine for.....58...hours now. Zero issues. And grabbed a bunch of stuff over BitTorrent to crank the connections. So...I assume it's a chipset or driver issue but plenty of people use i226 NICs. I see you do in your sig.


Who do I report this to for a bug report? OPNsense devs or the driver dev? Ugh.

[Seimus]

Glad to hear you were able to find some kind of solution.

As to you question. I don't think this is related to OPNsense, as by switching the HW you got improvements. The drivers that OPNsense uses are basically the one that come with BSD. Also the 226/225 NICs have sometimes weird issues depends chip from chip.

If you want to go the path if its a driver issue then BSD forums are the way to ask if they are aware, for reporting BUGs they have BUGzilla.

Another way is you can check minisforum forums if there is not a BIOS FIX or something else that could impact the NICs.

You can as well have a look on this thread, doesn't look like is same as your problem but definitely MS-01 has its share of problems in regards of Intel NICs

https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=40556.msg199399#msg199399

Regards,
S.