Proxmox / OPNsense speed issue (N100 dual NIC)

[tristankp]

Hi,

I have swapped my consumer router with an N100 mini PC with dual NICs running Proxmox and OPNsense. I have managed to configure the LAN and WAN interfaces successfully and have the network up and running.

I've noticed that I would always get 70Mb on a speed test, but now I've replaced the router I am only getting 25Mb. I'm using all of the same APs as I was previously.







Any suggestions here welcome! Thanks

 

[VMler]

Greetings, i have also a N100 system with Proxmox and OPNsense. The point is that by virtualizing a Firewall you definitly sacrifice performance. In my experience you drop 1/3 of the possible speed in comparision to direct hardware installation when you go "full virtual".

For example i have a 500 mbps internet connection and my N100 deliveres 320 mbps at maximum to the local network. Ok, i use suricata which takes a huge part of CPU-load, but coming back to your question: the main problem is that OPNsense respectively FreeBSD to be more accurate is not designed/optimized to be heavily used in virtual environments. Imho the biggest thing is the "missing" hardware offloading of the nics: each package has to be processed by the CPU with no hardware acceleration/support. This is why identical configured OPNsense on bare metal blows the virtual brother right out of the water.

The only way to get more speed out of your system is to pass trough the nics directly to the virtual guest to "restore" the offloading features. By doing this, the nics are "reserved" exclusivly to the guest and you have no access to the proxmox host itself wich is a little bit pointless unless you add more nics to the system (via usb or whatever).