@Jason:
@ilaurens:
No idea, I do not have much experience with pfsense, nor how it works.
But as far I know you can use pf_ring with snort to use multi cores.
Why not give it a try, if you have 10gbit stuff laying around.
https://www.google.nl/search?q=pfring+snort&oq=pfring+snort&aqs=chrome.0.69i57j0l3j69i62.1732j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fp=aba73ede39cbb7b9&q=pf_ring+snort&safe=off&spell=1
Interesting. Would this work with FreeBSD? If so, I'd be in for a bounty on anyone who would be willing to integrate this into the pfSense package for Snort. I'm actually less interested in this for 10Gbe speeds than I am for running on low-power hardware with multiple cores.
Anyway, I think I've decided to go with a pair of Cisco Nexus 5548UP switches with the L3 modules to solve my routing issue. I've talked to a few people who have installed them and they've all had solid experiences.
I did read something about SnortSP Beta
Shell-based user interface with embedded scripting language
Native IPv6, MPLS and GRE support (This feature is now included in 2.9.x)
Native support for inline operation (This feature is now include in 2.9.x)
More subsystem plugin types such as data acquisition modules, decoders and traffic analyzers
Multithreaded execution model - multiple analysis engines may operate simultaneously on the same traffic (There are certain subsystems of 2.9.x that are now multi-threaded)
Performance increases
The purpose of this program is to
Source: http://www.snort.org/snort-downloads/snortsp/