High Load Average when modification

[Adrien 1]

Hello,

We have a HA Pfsense that is in degraded mode (1 pfsense off).
Our pfsense version is the following (community version):

2.6.0-RELEASE (amd64)
built on Mon Jan 31 19:57:53 UTC 2022
FreeBSD 12.3-STABLE

This is the hardware :
CPU :

Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU C3858 @ 2.00GHz
12 CPUs: 1 package(s) x 12 core(s)
AES-NI CPU Crypto: Yes (active)
QAT Crypto: Yes (inactive) 

RAM : 16GB

We notice that after each modification on the pfsense we have a load increase.
This load increase causes a high load average (up to more than 20).

During this load build, we have the kernel using 421%CPU via the ps -aux command :

How to solve this problem? Does it come from the HA ? from the kernel ?

[SteveITS]

@adrien-1 Each modification of what?

Do you have a large rule set? There is this patch available in the System Patches package:

Disable pf counter data preservation to temporarily work around latency when reloading large rulesets (Redmine #12827)