Realtek->Intel Gigabit NIC performance drop

[cozmicf]

Hi, I recently bought an Intel Gigabit NIC since the NAS was crashing when transferring from a Samba share at a high speed, so I decided to ditch the onboard Realtek NIC. This has seen my speeds drop from ~27MBps to ~17MBps, and my seeks in Plex are much slower.

I just inserted the new NIC and updated the interface settings via the console to have the same static IP as was on the Realtek (I also of course moved the ethernet cable across from the Realtek to Intel). Do I need to change any other settings? All my plugins seem to work still.

I don't understand why the speeds have dropped so much? I would've expected a speed increase if anything.

This is the Intel NIC I bought: https://www.amazon.com.au/Intel-EXPI9301CTBLK-Gigabit-Desktop-Adapter/dp/B001CY0P7G

 

[Tigersharke]

I believe your performance with the intel NIC in place of the Realtek one should improve. I cannot say what might be the issue but I would not believe it is the new NIC itself. It may be good to check the ethernet cable(s), intermediate ethernet switches (it acts in a router/splitter type capacity) and firewall/routers involved in your network.

Outside of FreeNAS, if I were switching from the realtek ethernet (which I also have on the mobo), to an intel NIC (which I have, tho it is a dual nic), I would need to make adjustments with ifconfig and /etc/rc.conf so that the new nic (em0 & em1) would be initialized and used in place of the old nic (re0).

One other thing I just realized, is that there may be something like cached routing involved, which means that a router/firewall (such as OPNsense which I use) might maintain an arp cache which is causing some packets to still be sent to the old ethernet address/device. I am very not good with network stuff, but I believe if you can find where any arp cache is, and clear that, after things "recover" pehaps that will solve it?

ARP cache - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

An ARP cache is a collection of Address Resolution Protocol entries (mostly dynamic) that are created when an IP address is resolved to a MAC address (so the computer can effectively communicate with the IP address).

 

[cozmicf]

Thanks for the answer. I did update the configuration using the console. I did a few hard reboots which may have screwed up something in the OS, so I had to do a 'System Upgrade' using a USB to restore it so it could at least boot again and now my speeds are where they should be.

I think it probably had nothing to do with the upgrade I did, but rather the ARP cache or similar must have reset itself after some amount of time, or something to that effect. Anyway I seem to be getting good speeds now.

Thanks again!