Troubleshooting performance issues

[shakeshuck]

I have a problem with throughput across an OpenBSD firewall running inside VirtualBox in a Solaris zone, and would appreciate assistance in ruling out VirtualBox as the cause of the issue before I go poking sticks into the cages of the folk on the OpenBSD mailing list.

I have a Samba server in a zone, accessed through the firewall, and realised there was a problem after it took two days to transfer about 700GB of data onto it.
I then used crystaldiskmark from a remote m/c to do a quick test, which showed 17 MB/s write speed. I moved the Samba server to the same subnet as the remote m/c (to avoid the firewall) and tested again, it came out as 52 MB/s. So somewhere, between VirtualBox and OpenBSD there is some tuning required!

Please can somebody show me where (and how) to look?

[shakeshuck]

I haven't been able to test like with like, but I did try booting VirtualBox from a pfsense live CD. Without adding any rulesets, data transfer across VB/pfsense was up 25% in comparison to OpenBSD with rulesets.

As a quickie I also set up ipfilter in the zone (not in VB), also with a minimal ruleset, and the performance was just short of the native samba disk access.

It looks unfortunately that there is quite a penalty for trying to do disk access via VB. It means I won't get to use some of the features I wanted to use, but in this case disk speed is important. Oh well.