PfSense and symetric multithreading
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Hey folks
I have been looking into the question and gotten different responses depending on the hardware platform and implementation. So I thought I would see what you think.
From my reading, SMT/Hyperthreading should be turned off if you're reaching the limits of your hardware and are trying to get maximum routing/firewall performance. The idea being that with multi-queue NICs the system will create queues equal to the number of threads available and since some of the cores are not "real" you lose performance or increase latency. At least that's my understanding of it.
Many of the posts, however, are years old and pre-date multithreaded pf, so maybe its no longer this way and having as many threads as possible is a net positive. Also, if you're running other packages, having threads to spare seems to be recommended.
So what does everyone think?
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Leave HT / Multi-threading on.