@pfBasic:
@Evronius:
I have 4 PCs now, and if i use all of them on the network the CPU usage pending between 26 and 35%. This is on WAN to LAN usage. I will do more testing and tweaking and i hope to lower this usage.
Thank you very much! Does that CPU usage change much between 1 & 4 clients? Is that utilizing the full potential of the WAN?
@Evronius:
This is a bit offtopic, but i think it have a part of this as well.
It is your topic my friend! ;)
@Evronius:
I am a bit worried about the upcomming LAN event i will host. Some tests i did between 2 PCs with 10Gbit cards had a really high CPU usage. One machine has an i5-3550. The other one has an i3-4130 and its really having problems to get 10Gbit speeds. Both up and down wont go over 4Gbit. After much tweaking i got maxed out at 5.8Gbit and the CPU usage on the i3-4130 is 100%. If i switch from the i3-4130 to i5-6400 or my new i7-7700 i get 10Gbit speeds. I checked for answers all over the internet and i find some interesting stuff here. To keep it simple, 2 Windows 10 klients on 10Gbit needs 4 cores, and these will have a high CPU usage when going full 10Gbit! This got me to think and wonder over alot of things.
Here is a few questions i have.
1: Does this apply to DIY and prebuild pfsense riggs as well?
2: Is there any performance info on DIY pfsense riggs compared to prebuild ones?
3: Does a prebuild pfsense box have benefits in performance and hardware over DIY ones?
Do i need to elaborate here, or are you all with me on where i am going with this?
10Gbit LAN is a totally different ball game. What were the tests you were using?
I would imagine that 10Gbit WAN would be very resource intensive, but wouldn't know. I would have thought 10Gbit LAN would more or less just need good 10Gbit NICs and a good 10Gbit switch? I've read that Intel is actually not necessarily the best in town for 10Gbit NICs yet, it sounds like Chelsio is the winner in that category for now but I couldn't expound on that at all and it may not even be true anymore.
Performance wise the pre-built boxes sold by pfSense don't have any edge over DIY, you could buy and build the exact same specs yourself if you wanted to. Generally speaking you will get a lot more performance for your money DIY than prebuilt.
pfSense is exceptional at running on old used hardware and still providing features previously only found in very expensive industrial grade equipment.
What the pre built pfSense units do have is a stamp of approval that they will work as intended for the rated specs and they come with a year of support from the pfSense team!
These things are very valuable if you are applying pfSense in a professional environment to a paying customer.
They can also be very valuable if you are looking to learn pfSense as you get a year of Gold access.
It's up to you to decide if it's worth it to you or not for personal use, the prebuilt hardware absolutely has advantages but they won't necessarily be any faster than what you can build yourself. In fact you can very likely build a much faster unit for less money if that's the only goal.
Sort of… With 1 klient running hard the CPU usage is around 11%. I think it is quite high usage, but then i do have fast internet. I have not checked out the usage when 2 or 3 klients are going rampage on the network and internet. And yes, i utilizing the WAN 100% when i checked the CPU usage on 4 clients. I just noticed that i havnt checked the RAM usage yet. So i overlooket that. But 8GB would be more then enough.
And here is what i whas thinking on the performance on 1Gbit vs 10Gbit test. When this box is driving the upcoming easter lanparty, it will have around 50 PCs on it. And games today are internet based. Almost no new games runs local TCP or IPX. And with so many PCS pushing both games and alot of other stuffs on the internet it would be alot of stress on the CPU. So i figured that a quick speedtest on 10Gbit would give a clue on how hard many clients would impact. But i also see why this isnt applicable here. A big miss from my side. Got sidetracked by my own hype here
But compared to the prebuild boxes my machine would handle a high number of clients quite easy. I will now this for sure when the LAN is up and running.
When i tested the Intel X540-T1 NICs it whas both small files and big files up to 40GB each in ordinary Windows file transfer. No programs used. These cards is for an upcoming project that is pure fun and has no other purpose than that :) But it would be quite nice to use these. But the high CPU usage when transfering files dont feel great.