# ixl, 10GE, TSO & pf - freezeup? (FreeBSD 11.0)



## Peter Eriksson (Sep 19, 2017)

I've bee trying to tune our file servers lately and I decided I'd have a go at making the network interfaces run at full speed (we only get around 3Gbps over a 10Gpbs line without tuning).

Enabling TSO & LRO got the desired effect - speed measured with "iperf" immediately got up to 9-10Gbps and thing seemed to work nicely. For a couple of days that is... When suddenly one of the servers developed problems establishing new connections to the AD servers. Ping packets would get lost and other strange issues.

At that time we disabled "TSO" with "ifconfig -tso" and the traffic started to flow normally again (albeit at "just" around 3Gbps).

I've been trying to figure out what happened but it's kind of difficult to pinpoint. Any ideas? I tried to look at the "netstat -m" output to see if the system was running out of buffers but no numbers stuck out (all pretty normal).

When Googling for similar issues I noticed that people have had similar problems (but the descriptions doesn't really seem to fit "100%")  in conjunction with "PF" as a firewall. 

I'm considering switching to IPFW instead - have other people seen similar problems there?

Would an update to FreeBSD 11.1 (with the newer version of the IXL driver) solve this?


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## rootbert (Sep 20, 2017)

did you check the number of states? I think it defaults to 10.000 with pf but can of couse be set to a higher value.


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## Peter Eriksson (Sep 20, 2017)

rootbert said:


> did you check the number of states? I think it defaults to 10.000 with pf but can of couse be set to a higher value.


Yes, and we have increased it (a lot) since 10k states is way to small.. We also changed our firewall rules to avoid keeping that much state for local connections....


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