Max Mac Count
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bump.
What do you mean? You still have an unanswered issue?
As has been already stated, you can't get 8K devices on a distinct VLAN per device on a single NIC. The limitation is the 12 bit VLAN id field in the frame.
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8k is the Total mac count , meaning this 8k is split among the diferent vlans. Switches and routers have a TOTAL mac adress limit .
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check this out , this is the real problem like stated here : http://www.vyatta.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=53428
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I can't find any evidence of a limit on the FreeBSD arp table size, but that may just be an indication I don't know where to look.
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If I recall correctly, pfsense is limited only the amount of ram you have installed. and continuying the same remembering line, one mac entry is one kB of ram, so 8MB would handle 8k mac-addresses.
But this was only that if I remember correctly.
Comparison between Switch and pfSense is not reasonable anyway. Those are different kind of beasts for it's own purpose.
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FreeBSD uses the routing table for ARP entry storage, as such it's limited by the routing table size. The routing table doesn't have a fixed limit. You'll eventually run out of kernel memory, but we're talking very large numbers, into the millions. There are many production systems that have 400,000+ routes (full BGP feed), which is basically equivalent to having a small number of routes and 400,000+ ARP cache entries. So I don't think you'll have any issues unless you have millions of directly-connected devices, which would probably be a really poor network design and probably generate enough traffic it would melt down any firewall you can get.
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so you're saying i don't need to modify the "net.ipv4.neigh.default.gc_thresh3=8192" to a value of my needs? 8192 is arbitrary , i chosed this large number.
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so you're saying i don't need to modify the "net.ipv4.neigh.default.gc_thresh3=8192" to a value of my needs? 8192 is arbitrary , i chosed this large number.
There is no such tunable on pfSense.
pfSense is based on FreeBSD, not Linux (like Vyatta you mentioned, and most other router/firewall distros), so the base system is very different "under the hood".
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So the question remains , is there a limit on the arp entries after all? till now nobody can say for sure , a definitive answer would be good , since i plan to deploy a install and the sucess is based on pfsense suporting such a high number or arp entries.
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Switches and routers have a TOTAL mac adress limit .
Many of them have much less memory than the pfSense minimum.
So the question remains , is there a limit on the arp entries after all? till now nobody can say for sure , a definitive answer would be good
I doubt you will get a more definitive answer than
@cmb:FreeBSD uses the routing table for ARP entry storage, as such it's limited by the routing table size. The routing table doesn't have a fixed limit. You'll eventually run out of kernel memory, but we're talking very large numbers, into the millions. There are many production systems that have 400,000+ routes (full BGP feed), which is basically equivalent to having a small number of routes and 400,000+ ARP cache entries. So I don't think you'll have any issues unless you have millions of directly-connected devices, which would probably be a really poor network design and probably generate enough traffic it would melt down any firewall you can get.
FreeBSD has a number of memory "pools" that are used to allocate memory for different purposes. The sizes of these pools depends on the memory in the system. Hence the routing table might be able to grow to a significantly larger size on a system with 2GB RAM than it can on a system with 256MB RAM.
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Here's a second opinion from a few years ago:
http://freebsd.1045724.n5.nabble.com/Maximum-ARP-Entries-td4017394.htmlSteve
