pfSense » pfSense Plus

Customer in ticket 2947838007 is reportedly running into this issue as well.

Any Update ?

Kris Phillips wrote in #note-4: [[

Marking this as confirmed, as we have multiple instances of people reporting issues with high CPU usage with a high number of captive portal users.

I reported this issue in the forums in February 2024. We have large deployments with 8,000 to 10,000 captive portal users. Version 2.6 continues to function perfectly with the captive portal; however, attempts to switch to 2.7.2 have twice resulted in the same issue: excessively high CPU load, with CPU core 0 consistently reaching 100% utilization while other cores remain available. This appears to be related to the switch from IPFW to PF.

https://forum.netgate.com/topic/184647/increase-php-fpm-listening-queue-not-working-in-2-7-0/5?_=1735573058510

I would like to confirm that we have the same issue. Our two Netgate 8300 are used exclusively for Captive Portal and suffer from high CPU load at 1000-1500 users. Additionally, at some point (after weeks), Daemons will fail, nginx will display 50x, ssh will stop accepting connections leading to a manual reboot. Of course, I can't tell if these two issues are related. I've tried to implement a cronjob /etc/rc.restart_webgui daily, but it doesnt prevent the daemons from failing at some point and CPU load is still high. Running on 25.11.1.

Please get a status archive (go to /status.php) while the issue occurs and share it here.

There's already an open ticket at TAC, 40730123594, with status outputs shared twice. Last activity today.

Also, its impossible to share /status.php when the daemons crash, as the firewall is unreachable at that time.