I'm using a pair of onboard (vr) NICs on a net5501-80 (500 MHz Geode) with vlans to firewall a 36/4 mlppp connection. During heavy download top reports interrupts around 40-50% CPU usage with most of the remainder being idle.
I dropped in an Intel Pro 1000 GT (em, PCI) in place of one of the onboards to handle the internal vlans and during heavy downloading the interrupts dropped down to around 20%, but now the kernel process was reporting ~17% CPU usage. The idle process was not significantly different from the vr NIC to the em. I was surprised by this result, not only because of Intel's sterling reputation among pfsense users, but also because of the fact alone that the Intel NIC is gigabit hardware (on a gigabit switch). Was I wrong to expect a drop in CPU usage with the Intel GBE? Also, before somebody mentions it, TSO and LRO were enabled for this test. I tried disabling LRO, but this immediately caused pfsense to become unresponsive on the network and the serial console. After resetting it LRO was still enabled, so I didn't provoke it further. Within a couple hours pfsense had locked up again, so I moved the LAN cable back to the onboard NIC and it's been running stably for 17 hours since (with the Intel card still installed but not assigned). Thoughts? db --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] Commercial support available - https://portal.pfsense.org
