Severe throughput degradation with 0.73 on FreeBSD

[morganwdavis]

This new 0.73 build has severely degraded performance in my application compared to the previous 0.62_4. I'm running rinetd as a simple port 80/443 redirector over a Wireguard tunnel between two FreeBSD 13 servers.

Under the previous .62_4 version, loading a web page over the connection results in these respectable browser stats (about a second):

46 requests
759.24 kB / 413.67 kB transferred
Finish: 1.08 s
DOMContentLoaded: 468 ms
load: 603 ms

With the new 0.73 version, the same page has these stats (nearly 30 seconds):

45 requests
758.91 kB / 435.01 kB transferred
Finish: 28.06 s
DOMContentLoaded: 2.66 s
load: 28.06 s

You can literally watch the images on the page draw out in bands as the bytes stream over slowly and render like a PPP connection from 1998. Some requests simply fail to load and render broken web pages.

I initially suspected my problem was due to other factors, so I troubleshooted everything else until I finally narrowed it down to the recently updated version of rinetd. I found the older .62 package and installed it to replace .73 and all was well again.

I install rinetd through the FreeBSD packages mechanism. I reported this issue to the FreeBSD bug tracking system and the port maintainer requested that I share my findings here.

[marcin-gryszkalis]

I'm the original cause of update to 0.73 in FreeBSD ports :)

For reference: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=274331

I tested if for more than month on production and didn't notice this kind of degradation, although my usage patterns may differ (long living connections).

Older version used custom patch to use poll instead of classic select approach. There's an issue here to allow using modern methods: #16 although not work was done. I'll try to prepare patch here but it may take few days anyway. If it's critical you still may need to downgrade until it's ready.

[maxlor]

This is a "me too". Performance of my IMAP connections going through rinetd have dropped to about 10 KB/sec even though everything is connected with Gigabit LAN. FreeBSD 13.2.

[grembo]

Same here, been using rinetd forever and this is the first time I see any performance issues.

[grembo]

@marcin-gryszkalis Any news on this?

For my use case (backup over sftp), the difference in performance is 14 MB/s on 0.62 vs 30kb/s on 0.73 (so about 500x slower, which of course caused problems, as backups won't finish).

I opened a request to downgrade the FreeBSD port to the working version until this issue is resolved.

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=281873