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unable to get max link speed

Hi there,

I have been a Astaro / Sophos UTM user since V6 and it has served me well over the years but recently I ran into a problem that I can't yet solve. Some tips would be most welcome!

I have recently changed ISP's and the new ISP is a 80Mbps down/20Mbps up provider that requires PPPoE connection.

To trial this out at first I connected my laptop directly onto the model and setup a PPPoE connection which worked perfectly fine and I managed to get full 80Mbps down and 20Mbps up.

When connecting a dedicated Astaro / Sophos device, I now only seem to manage 50Mbps and 18Mbps down, with the same settings (MTU is correctly set at 1492).

In order to test I have turned off every single feature I could turn off, effectively making the UTM a router. Still it seems to be capped at 48~ Mbps.

has anyone seen this before? And where to start looking for a possible cause?

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0 RFCat_vk_01 over 10 years ago

Hi,
please tell us about your hardware, NICs, memory, CPU etc.

Ian M
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0 XelNaha over 10 years ago

Hi Ian,

So the hardware is a dual core 2.4Ghz AMD CPU with 4Gb of memory, which should have ample capacity without any features turned on. This is dedicated hardware and not a virtualised environment.

The NIC connected to the LAN:
eth0 NVIDIA Corporation MCP77 Ethernet
Slot: n/a
Auto negotiation: On
Supported link modes: 10baseT/Full,10baseT/Half,100baseT/Full,100baseT/Half,1000baseT/Full
Interrupt (IRQ): 22
PCI Device ID: 0x760:0x82f2
MII capable: Yes
HA link monitoring: Yes

and the NIC connected to the wan:
eth1 Intel Corporation 82541PI Gigabit Ethernet Controller
Slot: n/a
Auto negotiation: On
Supported link modes: 10baseT/Full,10baseT/Half,100baseT/Full,100baseT/Half,1000baseT/Full
Interrupt (IRQ): 17
PCI Device ID: 0x107c:0x1376
MII capable: No
HA link monitoring: Yes
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0 William Warren over 10 years ago in reply to XelNaha

Hi Ian,

So the hardware is a dual core 2.4Ghz AMD CPU with 4Gb of memory, which should have ample capacity without any features turned on. This is dedicated hardware and not a virtualised environment.

The NIC connected to the LAN:
eth0 NVIDIA Corporation MCP77 Ethernet
Slot: n/a
Auto negotiation: On
Supported link modes: 10baseT/Full,10baseT/Half,100baseT/Full,100baseT/Half,1000baseT/Full
Interrupt (IRQ): 22
PCI Device ID: 0x760:0x82f2
MII capable: Yes
HA link monitoring: Yes

and the NIC connected to the wan:
eth1 Intel Corporation 82541PI Gigabit Ethernet Controller
Slot: n/a
Auto negotiation: On
Supported link modes: 10baseT/Full,10baseT/Half,100baseT/Full,100baseT/Half,1000baseT/Full
Interrupt (IRQ): 17
PCI Device ID: 0x107c:0x1376
MII capable: No
HA link monitoring: Yes

If this amd cpu is more than 3 years old your hardware isn't up to snuff. you will need a new faster cpu at least.

Owner: Emmanuel Technology Consulting

http://etc-md.com

Former Sophos SG(Astaro) advocate/researcher/Silver Partner

PfSense w/Suricata, ntopng,

Other addons to follow
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0 dapor over 10 years ago

I also think that the bottleneck will be the Hardware, because I use a VM on a Intel i5 and be able to manage a 100Mbit/20Mbit connection with mostly all services activated

Regards Frank
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0 XelNaha over 10 years ago in reply to dapor

I also think that the bottleneck will be the Hardware, because I use a VM on a Intel i5 and be able to manage a 100Mbit/20Mbit connection with mostly all services activated

Regards Frank

I must say that the CPU doesn't flinch at 50Mbps, it's barely hitting 10%, so I'd argue that the hardware is fine to be honest.

I just tested it as well, speedtest.net with 55MBPS is at 90% idle, so hardware is more than capable of handling the load.
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0 Euphrates_01 over 10 years ago
Perhaps this:

eth0 NVIDIA Corporation MCP77 Ethernet

The general rule with this and other UTM distributions has been to use Intel or Broadcom NICs as others tend to be unreliable when pushing higher data rates (people don't start finding out, sometimes, until they upgrade their connection or begin, otherwise, pushing more data through the system than before). If you have an additional NIC or dual/quad Intel card or are willing to invest in one from eBay (Intel Pro PT 1000 series works very well) then you will be able to determine if that NIC is causing you problems (FYI, you will want to re-install after installation of NIC to ensure you don't introduce any issues adding hardware to the system).
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0 William Warren over 10 years ago

Nods..i am curious which model amd cpu is being used.

Owner: Emmanuel Technology Consulting

http://etc-md.com

Former Sophos SG(Astaro) advocate/researcher/Silver Partner

PfSense w/Suricata, ntopng,

Other addons to follow
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0 Amodin over 10 years ago in reply to Euphrates_01
Perhaps this:

eth0 NVIDIA Corporation MCP77 Ethernet

The general rule with this and other UTM distributions has been to use Intel or Broadcom NICs as others tend to be unreliable when pushing higher data rates (people don't start finding out, sometimes, until they upgrade their connection or begin, otherwise, pushing more data through the system than before). If you have an additional NIC or dual/quad Intel card or are willing to invest in one from eBay (Intel Pro PT 1000 series works very well) then you will be able to determine if that NIC is causing you problems (FYI, you will want to re-install after installation of NIC to ensure you don't introduce any issues adding hardware to the system).

My name is Amodin, and I support this answer! I too agree that this may be your issue, as that same driver seems to be plaguing the Linux community with driver issues and is most likely not compatible with UTM. I believe that this NIC is using a Realtek driver set, and if that is the case, therein lies your problem.
XG 19.5 GA 64-bit | Intel Xeon 4-core v3 1225 3.20Ghz
16GB Memory | 500GB SSD HDD | GB Ethernet x5
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0 XelNaha over 10 years ago in reply to Amodin

My name is Amodin, and I support this answer! I too agree that this may be your issue, as that same driver seems to be plaguing the Linux community with driver issues and is most likely not compatible with UTM. I believe that this NIC is using a Realtek driver set, and if that is the case, therein lies your problem.

I have used Intel only nics as well, same result. I have used this nic on several Linux distributions with near 1G throughput. I wouldn't call 50Mbps "pushing it", being about 0.5% utilisation.

I have run the same test on a quad core I5 with 32G of memory with dual intel Nics just now; same result 50~Mbps, when using Sophos UTM, but when using PPPoE directly connected to the modem, I get 80Mbps;

On Cisco routers we maintain, we can adjust the MSS by clamping it in the headers, does Sophos do this? Obviously you set the MTU size in the interface, but does it inspect TCP sessions and overwrite the MTU size in the TCP handshaking?
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unable to get max link speed

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