@Harvy66:
HFSC gives you strong control over bandwidth distribution while allowing other classes of flows to use spare capacity. I have a pretty over-powered system of an i5 3ghz quad and Intel i350-T2, and I'm only seeing about 10% cpu usage when running at 2Gb/s(1Gb full-duplex). Even when I used iperf to forcefully push 960kpps 64byte UDP packets, I was only seeing about 7% cpu usage. Seems UDP is much easier to process than TCP, probably because of the state validation.
The network card is the single most important part. The second is the CPU. You really don't need a high frequency CPU, just one with a decent amount of cache and not something like an Atom that has been aggressively optimized for low power. My next system, whenever that may be, will target 2.5ghz and 8 cores with decent cache.
Thanks for the info, HFSC sounds like what I need. I'll have to read up on it, whether traffic is prioritized by DSCP tag (fine for outgoing as I control the tags) or port number and/or IP address (incoming, can't rely on DSCP tags).
All the sub-kilobuck appliances sold at the pfsense store use flavors of Atom like the SG-2220 or SG-4860. I'm not sure I need any more ports than WAN and LAN, as I have a Netgear GS716Tv3, which I think can do VLAN for traffic segregation. If I could figure out how to use it.
What do you think are reasonable CPUs for QoS-ing the entirety of 250Mb or greater cable connection, if not the Atom appliances? I do use VPN occasionally, although highest performance here, while nice, is not a huge deal. So I would want a processor with AES-NI also? Intel NICs are a given, from what I've read.
Thanks for the help,