[BUGS] Net network performance question?

Fri Jan 25 12:06:02 AEDT 2019

Hi Dean,

Yes, it's a Netgear.  Telstra call it something like "Gateway Max".  Looks a lot like this one: 
https://www.netgear.com/service-providers/products/cable/gateways/C6300BD-Telstra.aspx <https://www.netgear.com/service-providers/products/cable/gateways/C6300BD-Telstra.aspx> 

Performance usually seems pretty decent.  Certainly for web browsing and what-not I've not experienced much in the way of issues.

"top" on the file server says that afpd is using about 1% of CPU, so that probably isn't the bottleneck...
systat -vmstat says that the ZFS drives are doing about 70tps, averaging about 2-3 MB/s, and are 25-30% busy.  So unless they're doing lots of pointless seeking, I don't think they're the bottleneck either.  I'm inclined to blame the WiFi protocols, perhaps exacerbated by afpd.

Cheers,

Andrew Reilly
E: areilly at bigpond.net.au
M: +61-409-824-272

> On 25 Jan 2019, at 11:47, Dean Hamstead <dean at fragfest.com.au> wrote:
> 
> ok youre on Telstra cable. Thats good actually.
> 
> I assume that youre using the all in one cable modem + wifi ? Is it a netgear?
> 
> 
> Dean
> 
> On 25/1/19 10:59 am, Andrew Reilly wrote:
>> Thanks for the comments.  Just to clarify, I'm not yet on the NBN.  If they squeak my installation in before the 2020 line-in-the-sand I guess I'll be happy.  I'm in the Telstra/Foxtel HFC footprint, and so will probably be the last connected.  I'll lose a bit of download speed (Bigpond HFC gets up to 120Mb/s on a good day) but I'm really looking forward to the up-tick in upload speed and reduced latency.  We'll see.  I'm afraid that the fact that NBN has been "imminent" for the last five years or so has rather held up enthusiasm for experimenting with other configurations.  I came close to running the modem in bridge mode and using a third-party WiFi router when I discovered the IPSec issue, but haven't, yet.  So IPv6 is something else to look forward to?  IPv4-only on Bigpond cable.
>> 
>> An experiment I could reasonably try, if it's still going this evening, would be getting a USB-C ethernet adaptor for the laptop and plugging it into the switch.
>> 
>> As an aside, that was some fairly spectacular breakage of my original message by the BUGS mail forwarder!  I'm sorry for whatever it was that I did to upset it.  Looks as though it re-assembled Apple's soft-wrap text into long lines, and then broke those at non-word boundaries with explanation marks.  I've not seen that happen before.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 
>> Andrew Reilly
>> E: areilly at bigpond.net.au
>> M: +61-409-824-272
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On 25 Jan 2019, at 10:31, Dean Hamstead <dean at fragfest.com.au> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Friends dont let friends run the ISP modem :)
>>> 
>>> Also, realistically WiFi will run at about 50% of its theoretical max speed.
>>> 
>>> Telstra's modems are notoriously terrible (as are most big name ISP's who customize the firmware), but on the plus side Telstra is now perhaps the only ISP that does IPv6 on NBN and ADSL products (Internode doesnt do it on products they are selling through AAPT wholesale, like NBN-HFC and NBN-FTTC)
>>> 
>>> If you don't use a phone service which Telstra insists on providing via their crappy modem - you can just replace it with something like a cheap TP-Link. Which you can likely reload with OpenWRT or similar. If youre using fttn then youll need to get a vdsl modem (even just a 1 port dm200 from netgear, in bridge mode).
>>> 
>>> Or you could run a pfsense/opnsense appliance, or roll your own via and bsd you like. For
>>> 
>>> I've not yet had the chance to get Telstra IPv6 running on a non-Telstra device though. Assuming they are just using DHCPv6 (they just use DHCP for ipv4) then it should just be a matter of providing settings they will accept.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Dean
>>> 
>>> On 25/1/19 10:18 am, Harry Woodward-Clarke wrote:
>>>> yeah - I would be suspicious of the Telstra device. I should have thought at least 20MB/s, and up to about 30MB/s without too much effort.
>>>> 
>>>> Of course, to get the super-duper speeds, both the Tx and Rx need to use multiple antennas (MIMO) - hence why some of the fancy-schmancy Access Points have all those antennas pointing every which way :)
>>>> 
>>>> The may be some tweaks you can do in the T-device (channel width, Tx power) but I suspect you are stuck unless you put a "real" Wireless Access Point in the mix.
>>>> 
>>>> .h
>>>> 
>>>> On Fri, 25 Jan 2019 at 09:49, Andrew Reilly <areilly at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
>>>> Here's a group that just might have a few clues for me.  Any suggestions gratefully accepted.
>>>> 
>>>> I run a FreeBSD system at home as a file server.  Have done since maybe '92 or so, but of course all of the moving parts and bits have changed over time.  Today's version has a new-ish version-1 Ryzen motherboard with 32G RAM (which I've managed to stop spontaneously freezing a couple of times a week, over the break, by locking _all_ P-states off except 0, in BIOS).  That is host to an NVME SSD that holds root, /usr, /var, etc, and four 4T Hitachi drives in RaidZ form for user data.  There are two quota-limited ZFS volumes on there that I use to TimeMachine backup the house's two macOS systems.  Main network file service to the macs is over the latest Samba, with all of the Unix and Mac-friendly tweaks enabled, and that doesn't seem to work too badly.  Not totally fluid (SMB restrictions on file name characters bight every so often, as do slightly weird file permissions) but tolerable, and seemingly the only option really supported by macOS these days.  TimeMachine still!
> !
>>  run!
>>>>  s over AFP, so NetAtalk is on there too.  That box is connected to a switch over gigabit ethernet, as is my mac desktop and a Telstra Netcomm cable-modem-cum-wifi-router.  Hanging off the 5GHz Wifi band at the moment is a brand new MacBook Air, a replacement for my wife's dying old MacBook.  It's on it's first boot, and is attempting to restore from the last backup of the MacBook, some 280G.  It claims that it will take another 36 hours, at the current average pace of 2MB/s.  That seems low to me, by perhaps as much as a factor of 60.  I've read that 5GHz WiFi is supposed to manage 1300 Mb/s under good conditions, and in this case the new laptop is about eight feet from the WiFi router, in line of sight.  Doesn't get much better than that.  Not that there's much I can do about it now, but does anyone have any thoughts about why the restore performance should be so awful?  Could it be bottlenecking on the laptop's APFS write speed?  Something pessimal about NetAtalk ove!
> r !
>>  WiF!
>>>>  i?  A rubbish network stack in the Telstra modem?  (Heaven knows the user-interface and the firewall are rubbish.  The device drops all IPSec packets silently on the ground.)
>>>> 
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> 
>>>> Andrew Reilly
>>>> E: areilly at bigpond.net.au
>>>> M: +61-409-824-272
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
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>>>> 
>>>> -- 
>>>> 
>>>> Harry Woodward-Clarke
>>>> imago Dei, in quolibet homine, inveniatur
>>>> Seek Justice, Love Mercy, Walk Humbly with Your God - Micah 6v8
>>>> 
>>>> 
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