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    Pfsense and use of multicore in custom appliance

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
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    • S Offline
      salITwannabe
      last edited by

      Hello All, newbie to pfsense and I had a general question. Does Pfsense utilize all cores in appliances that more than 1 core? I have several boxes that I am looking to deploy that either have 4 cores or 8 cores (which I know is an overkill).

      Most of my clients sites are either 1G Fibre service or higher and have 10G networks and not PPO. Will be utilizing WG, IPS, VPN tunneling, NTOP, pfblocker etc. Clients wants to make sure there is performance lags.

      I tried Opnsense (dare I say it on this forum) but it performance seems to be subpar and only utilizes 1 core. and is not as polished in performance it seems.

      Appreciate any feed back.

      Tx

      JKnottJ 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • JKnottJ Offline
        JKnott @salITwannabe
        last edited by

        @salitwannabe

        First off, pfsense is essentially a pretty front end for FreeBSD, where all the routing etc. takes place. That said, some things, such as OpenVPN are definitely single core, but IPSec can use multiple cores, IIRC. So, it depends on what you're looking at and you should be looking at what FreeBSD does.

        PfSense running on Qotom mini PC
        i5 CPU, 4 GB memory, 32 GB SSD & 4 Intel Gb Ethernet ports.
        UniFi AC-Lite access point

        I haven't lost my mind. It's around here...somewhere...

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        • stephenw10S Offline
          stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
          last edited by

          Yes, it will use multiple CPU cores. Especially if you have a bunch of packages installed where loads can be spread more evenly. But, also yes, some things are single threaded.

          If you need to route at or close to 10G and run things like IPS or ntop then almost nothing would be overkill.

          Steve

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