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    Fine tuning pfSense for large environments

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
    6 Posts 3 Posters 2.3k Views
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    • C
      carzin
      last edited by

      We primarily use pfSense as a captive portal for our students to onboard for secure wireless.  At the beginning of the semester, we can see hundreds of people connected concurrently on each box.  Currently, the boxes are running on 4 cores and 12 Gig of RAM.  That never seems to be an issue.  However, it did dawn on me that there could be some advanced settings to tweak to improve the performance during peak periods.  Does anyone have suggestions?

      Thanks!

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      • P
        Paint
        last edited by

        @carzin:

        We primarily use pfSense as a captive portal for our students to onboard for secure wireless.  At the beginning of the semester, we can see hundreds of people connected concurrently on each box.  Currently, the boxes are running on 4 cores and 12 Gig of RAM.  That never seems to be an issue.  However, it did dawn on me that there could be some advanced settings to tweak to improve the performance during peak periods.  Does anyone have suggestions?

        Thanks!

        Can you provide some more details like the CPU model, chipset of the NIC cards, WAN speed, if there is a VPN, and if there are any VLANs?

        pfSense i5-4590
        940/880 mbit Fiber Internet from FiOS
        BROCADE ICX6450 48Port L3-Managed Switch w/4x 10GB ports
        Netgear R8000 AP (DD-WRT)

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        • C
          carzin
          last edited by

          They are all virtualized on a very high end UCS cluster (virtually unlimited resources).  The system sees the current setup as the following:

          Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2683 v3 @ 2.00GHz
          4 CPUs: 4 package(s) x 1 core(s)

          I am using the E1000 network adapter type.

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          • P
            Paint
            last edited by

            @carzin:

            They are all virtualized on a very high end UCS cluster (virtually unlimited resources).  The system sees the current setup as the following:

            Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2683 v3 @ 2.00GHz
            4 CPUs: 4 package(s) x 1 core(s)

            I am using the E1000 network adapter type.

            Cool. Take a look at this page- https://calomel.org/freebsd_network_tuning.html

            pfSense i5-4590
            940/880 mbit Fiber Internet from FiOS
            BROCADE ICX6450 48Port L3-Managed Switch w/4x 10GB ports
            Netgear R8000 AP (DD-WRT)

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            • C
              carzin
              last edited by

              awesome!  many thanks

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              • G
                grandrivers
                last edited by

                that looks like websever optimizations  NOT a firewall

                pfsense plus 25.03 super micro A1SRM-2558F
                C2558 32gig ECC  60gig SSD

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