We use two pfsense firewalls at two locations and have connected the locations using IPsec site-by-site. That had worked well for a long time, now we had installed the 2.6.0 update at both locations and suddenly the speed dropped massively. I've analyzed this a bit and have read several posts about it.
The tunnel is online for phase 1 and phase 2, I can also ping the host in the other network and have no packet loss with ICMP ping. If I now measure with iperf from a host to the remote firewall, I have a bad throughput, only in the Kbit/s range and with Wireshark I see an awfully large number of TCP retransmissions, if I test from the other side then the speed is almost at normal level.
With wireshark there are a lot of TCP - Retransmissions
I read on the internet that we should adjust the MTU and MSS on the PFsense, I tried that too and there is no change. Since it worked before the update, I don't really know what could be the reason and how I troubleshoot this issue.
UPDATE
I created a trace on both firewalls and analyzed the packets. A packet arrives with errors on the remote firewall, but what exactly does that mean, or how can I determine what exactly went wrong?
In the following picture there is a snap of the trace with marked the origin packet.
And in this picture you can see the same Packet on destination Firewall.
UPDATE 2
I found some more Informations, while I debugging this ipsec Tunnel I had found that the Packet Size is the Problem, some issues while fragmentation of Packets. If I do a ping (ping -f 192.168.3.1 -l 969
) with Packet Size of 969 Byte everythin is okay, with 970 there is packetloss.
So there is a Issue with fragmentation and I set the following Options in Firewall tab: