Firewalla Gold - Poor Torrent Performance
So far the only issue I've seen with Firewalla Gold Pro is that it does not get good performance with torrents.
My setup is with two cable modems, each on a different ISP provider, each with 1 Gbps bandwidth. Testing with fast.com I see 2 Gbps bandwidth available. Firewalla has been performing wonderfully for normal usage.
However, when downloading the Ubuntu ISO images via torrent I only see about 300 Mbps achieved by each connection, so only getting 600 Mbps on a 2 Gbps dual WAN setup. To further investigate the problem I logged into the Firewalla Pi4 over SSH and ran `htop` to see if it was CPU limited... And indeed that appears to be the issue. There appears to be too much firewall activity in a torrent swarm for the Firewalla to keep up with.
My preferred solution to this problem is to be able to run the Firewalla software on my Core i9 Intel NUC Extreme 12, which would be able to provide a 10G interface to the LAN, and two 2.5G interfaces via expansion card. I understand that you're selling a vertically integrated hardware/software solution based on the Raspberry Pi, but I would happily pay for a software license to get access to the wonderful app features and waive support for any hardware compatibility issues. The Firewalla app and other software is fantastic.
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Is your Dual WAN in load-balancing mode? and do you have equal weight across them? If you run just one circuit, do you get gigabit?
The reason I am asking is, dual behavior can be different ... and yes firewalla may have more load if you have connections that's keep on going up and down ... not sure this is impacting you; feel free to create a case, we can take a look
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Ended up spending 12 hours yesterday learning how to set up ProxMox and OPNsense and configure all the features (wireguard VPN, ddclient dyndns, unbound DNS, suricata IDS, Zenarmor, and load balancing). Got it all working eventually with some frustration, but it does what I was hoping Firewalla could do and now I can get full speed from torrents.
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Plugged in two gigabit cable modems into ports 3,4 and configured them for load balancing WAN. Verified fail over works fine. Verified that IP address websites return randomly one or the other. Verified fast.com achieves 2Gbps rate.
Then downloaded two of the Ubuntu ISO install image torrents and noted that the bandwidth achieved was only about 600 Mbits. Noted that CPU usage was hitting 100% on the device during this time.
Switched to higher end machine running OPNSense and now getting full data rate as expected.
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We are just now having to send out a number of ISO's and have noticed this exact same issue, no seeding is happening. I have even opened and suspended the server with bi-directional traffic temporarily and the speeds are tremendously slow for anything coming down, and zilch for seeding. Has there been any update to this issue. If I need to, I can build another VM and do what the last poster put on running on different HW. I agree though with some of the other posts on here and the Internet, kinda disappointing at the moment, when I'm under the crunch and having spent over $500 to take some management load off my shoulder's now having to configure another solution. I'm hoping there is just a post I haven't seen yet to fix this. I've opened up, UDP & TCP ports, opened the whole darn thing, and performance stinks and seeding is non-existent.
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Just adding my experience, Firewalla seems to be ass at handling torrents.. Either shut active protect/ad filtering off, bypass firewalla, or just suffer with it. Few years into owning a Firewalla Gold, and not too impressed. This product is for tech nerds to buy for their grandmas, not for power users.
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