Testing Performance

naddel81

Hi @ all,

I want to setup a pfsense router for our primary school. I have an athlon le 1660 (passmark around 900) and 1gig of ram for that matter. I bought a second gigabit card and will try to install pfsense in a virtual machine.
Now I would like to test througput and just connect a second PC behind the box. so it would be Internet on LAN1 (192.168.2.X) to WAN on pfsense and then to LAN2 (192.168.3.X). So that would be a NAT route and could be used to simulate internet traffic, right?
Then I just use iperf from LAN1 to LAN2 and that is it?
Any help is highly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Best wishes!

Guest

I want to setup a pfsense router for our primary school. I have an athlon le 1660 (passmark around 900) and 1gig of ram for that matter. I bought a second gigabit card and will try to install pfsense in a virtual machine.

Why in a VM and not native on the hardware directly? Do you have perhaps one GB more RAM?

Now I would like to test througput and just connect a second PC behind the box. so it would be Internet on LAN1 (192.168.2.X) to WAN on pfsense and then to LAN2 (192.168.3.X). So that would be a NAT route and could be used to simulate internet traffic, right?

For a LAN test it would right going well. But for a WAN test it could be better to set up a
small Switch in front of the WAN Port and connect the one PC there as a Server and the
other PC inside of the LAN as a client.

Any help is highly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

How fast is your Internet connection?
How many users must be served with that hardware?
Do you plan to install any packets on that pfSense hardware?
Are you planning to realize WiFi support for BYOD for teachers and/or children owned devices?

What else could matching well;

Squid & SquidGuard & SARG & Snort could be matching very well for that doing!
OpenLDAP for wired clients, Radius Server for WiFi clients (teacher) and the Captive Portal (for children)

javcasta

Hi.

It would be interesting to know if there is any specific script or app to perform a stress test (testing performance) with pfSense, without having to have the whole lan connected with a lot of traffic.

Does anyone know any?

Regards

heper

you need to measure through the firewall. this can be done with iperf

iperf-server <–-> pfsense(wan) | pfsense(lan) <---> iperf-client

Guest

Does anyone know any?

PRTG server stress test tool could be the right one for doing that.

johnpoz

The prtg stress webserver stress tool could be used to simulate users.. Need a webserver..

I would then run the tool against the webserver when they are the same L2 network.. pfsense not involved… This would be your benchmark, then run the tool across pfsense where client running the test tool is on network A, and webserver is on network B..

You can find out about the FREE tool from here.
https://www.paessler.com/tools/webstress

While the iperf test will test to see if how fast you can move packets.. Its only going to be 1 stream, and not in any way simulating what say normal users would be doing to the internet, etc. This sort of test would be a closer use case to users surfing the web.

Guest

…..would be a closer use case to users surfing the web.

This could also be a nice test fir sure and on top of this it might be also
that he is able to set up that iPerf test with the -p "n"command to high
up or scaling up the entire workload. As an example:

iPerf Client --------------------------------------> iPerf Server
IP 10.1.1.2                                          IP 10.1.1.1

#iperf -c 10.1.1.1 -P 8

so over that test it will then be used 8 streams and that could be also really filling up or
saturate that line.