Terrible stability with own router

[Eds89]

I'm trying to use my own router (pfSense VM), with my new 900Mbps Gigafast connection.

Setting up a second WAN link is fine and I can see a new WAN gateway appear, and stats look good in pfSense dashboard.

However, if I change my default gateway on the router from my Virgin cable connection to the Vodafone connection, and start sending traffic down the link, my stability is terrible with large numbers of dropped pings, and frequent really high latency (upwards of 2 seconds).

I was going to speak to Vodafone support, but doubt they will help me with this. Can anyone offer any suggestions as to what might be causing this issue?

Connecting a Windows laptop with a PPPoE connection setup, it doesn't seem to have any issues.

The only thing I can think of, is that as the switch I have connected to the fiber NTU cannot VLAN tag itself, I have it set to send both tagged VLAN 911 traffic AND tagged VLAN traffic for my LAN 1 to the NTU.

Could that be causing the behaviour?

My suspicion is no, because if I bypass the switch, I see the same behaviour, so assume it's something within pfSense that Vodafone doesn't like.

Can confirm that direct connection bypassing the switch, and setting my VLAN tag on my Vmware vswitch, also has the same issue, so is not the cause.

I will setup a brand new pfsense VM with a blank/basic config to test, just to see if there is a config issue on my current install causing this.

Cheers

Eds

[Eds89]

Does look to be a pfSense side problem, as a new VM with basic install seems (mostly) unaffected

[Eds89]

Seems like the issue might be related to pfSense ALTQ/PRIQ traffic shaping, because as soon as I set up my shaping rules as I had on the previous install, I started seeing the problematic behaviour,

Cheers

Eds

[CrimsonLiar]

So what are you actually doing that requires traffic shaping?  And if you need to on pFsense, have you included a rule that catches everything you aren't specifically optimizing?

[Eds89]

I want to prioritise my Plex traffic, so am using a high priority queue for traffic on the port used by my Plex server for remote access.

Yes, the wizard creates a default priority queue which is on a floating rule for anything not covered by that port.

Cheers

Eds