# FreeBSD slow network performance on AWS



## user222 (Nov 2, 2016)

I'm trying to use FreeBSD as my VPN gateway on AWS EC2. I can't get the network throughput I can with a Debian AMI of the same instance size.

I've tried multiple comparisons with different instance sizes and I'm always getting about 2MB/s with FreeBSD. Whereas with Debian I get anywhere from 5MB/s to 20MB/s.

I've tried disabling TSO, to no effect. Any ideas out there? I'm using ami-2d6d6347.

Thanks.


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## ABV (Nov 4, 2016)

What kind of network drivers are used in the FreeBSD instance? If they're not paravirtualized that may be decreasing performance as compared to Debian. Check the notes on PV drivers here.


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## user222 (Nov 7, 2016)

Thanks for the heads up on that. 

After further testing, I determined that the slowness only occurs when transferring data from an external IP address. When I do the same test internally, speed is very fast. So the FreeBSD instance is performing fine, and it is something to do with how AWS rate-limits traffic from outside. (Which is odd, that network speeds to instances of different OS's would behave differently only externally.) AWS is weird.


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