Max Concurrent Sessions

bugsy

Hi,

I've been checking different firewall appliances out there on the market and most of them indicate the maximum concurrent sessions or throughput that their appliance can handle (say 128,000 max concurrent sessions / 550+ Mbps firewall performance on a certain juniper brand appliance). How about if I will use PFsense, how can I get this information, can I compute this based on the hardware I will be using?

Thanks.

Nachtfalke

Hi,

take a look here:
http://www.pfsense.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=52&Itemid=49

This is based on pfsense 1.2.3
Todays CPUs are more efficent and they have multicore.
Throughput should be dependent on the CPU speed and fireall states on the RAM.
But I am not sure at all. There were several discussions on the forum about throughput of 1Gbit/s (with VPN).

A high quality NIC (intel) is in any case a good solution.

bugsy

Hi,

So it is really dependent then on the cpu and lan card being used. Would you recommend using PFsense or say OpenBSD's PF as firewall / load balancer for a Massive Online Gaming environment with hundreds or thousands of user connecting simultaneously? I'm really an opensource advocate and have never used any enterprise hardware firewall in all of my networks and I have this new project involving game servers. Would really appreciate all the help and suggestions you could provide.

Thanks in advance

Nachtfalke

Hi,

I do not have any experience in such a big environment but in the pfsense online docs there is a scenario explaint with four or five DSL lines and an internet cafe or gaming cafe !? not sure at all.
It explains how to do loadbalancing.

Further in the forum I read about LAN partys and using pfsense. perhaps you will get there some more information.