@senate014:
but when then I keep remembering that PFSense 1.2 never skipped a beat using the same ISP and setup.
pfSense 2.0 has a different FreeBSD kernel from previous versions and other mechanisms may have changed as well. Its not always useful to extrapolate from the behaviour of previous versions.
@senate014:
Any ideas? ???
See my previous post for some ideas. Additional suggestions follow:
Have a look at the RRD graphs at the time of the mailouts. Maybe there is a spike then in the usage of some resource, even to exhaustion. pfSense will probably buffer some TCP data for each connection. If all available memory is used for that buffering then apinger may not be able to do its job.
If the mailout application has a way of reducing the maximum number of concurrent connections or otherwise restricting its bandwidth demands invoke that mechanism.
Use traffic shaping to reserve some bandwidth for apinger OR to limit the bandwidth used by the mailout. If I recall correctly there is a HOWTO for the pfSense 2.0 traffic shaper in this forum. I haven't used the traffic shaper. It is apparently different from that in previous versions and a number of people seem to have found it hard to configure so you might not want to take this step unless you are confident about what you are doing.