My old setup was:

VSDL modem -> pfsense on mini J1900 Celeron (2 GHz) -> CISCO SG300 10MPP switch -> Rukus R310 wifi -> Laptop

Currnet setup

Fiber model -> pfsense on mini J1900 Celeron (2 GHz) -> CISCO SG300 10MPP switch -> Rukus R310 wifi -> Laptop

Today i got my 1GBit fiber installed (big deal for those like me living in rural areas) only to discover that my current network setup is not allowing me to benefit from it.

I was on VSDL copper wire before and was probably in the region of 50-60 MBit/s with my above current setup. Even when removing the wifi bottle and linking with Cat5 UTP wire directly to switch, I’m not getting major improvements.

When I got the fiber installed this morning I was disappointed when I saw only marginal gain running at 80 MBit/s (c. +30 MBit). So I decided to connect the laptop via LAN cable directly to modem. I got a starkling 900MBit/s. So, along my network I have bottlenecks.

THe first one I tested was my little pfsense machine. I installed the speedtext-cli command and was surprised to find that it was giving my around 300 MBit/s. So a lot better than my laptop on its usual wifi connection but still only 33% of what I get directly off the modem.

So my first question is how can it be that my little mini J1900 Celeron (2 GHz) with 4 GB RAM cannot handle this bandwith? Do I need an upgrade for my pfsense machine? I noticed that the peak CPU demand as speedtest-cli was running was in the 60% region, far from a saturated CPU and RAM only occupied for about 30%. If it is my little pfsense machine, how far do I have to go with finding the right little machine that can handle 1 GBit/s.

The next question is if I’m getting 300 MBit/s on the WAN connection of the pfSense machine, how is it that I only see a small percentage of this on my laptop? i.e. a drop from 300 MBit/s to 80 MBit/s? I guess I would have to test the switch to start and then move to the wifi access points …

  • @listlessEnglish
    22•4 months ago

    So my first question is how can it be that my little mini J1900 Celeron (2 GHz) with 4 GB RAM cannot handle this bandwith?

    • check ethtool for link speed: sudo ethtool enp2s0 | egrep 'Speed|Duplex' Your device name may be different from enp2s0. use ip link to see all devices. if it’s not
    Speed: 1000Mb/s
Duplex: Full

    then that’s probably a bad sign.

    • that is a 10 year old celeron processor. celeron were the budget (a.k.a. cheapest, slowest) class processor at the time. it’s quite likely that it cannot keep up.
    • If you still think it’s not CPU directly, use iotop to see if you have I/O bottleneck.
    • @trilobite@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      2•4 months ago

      sudo ethtool enp2s0 | egrep ‘Speed|Duplex’

      Assuming you mean running these in the command prompt of pfSense? Tried but says “not found”. Same for “ip link”

      • Prison MikeEnglish
        3•4 months ago

        pfSense is UNIX-based and those commands are generally included with Linux and probably Linux-specific.

        • @listlessEnglish
          3•4 months ago

          Ah, didn’t realize pfSense is the OS, not something that runs on linux. My command examples won’t work for you.