Netgate Discussion Forum
    • Categories
    • Recent
    • Tags
    • Popular
    • Users
    • Search
    • Register
    • Login

    Something to ponder for future small appliances...

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Official Netgate® Hardware
    1 Posts 1 Posters 281 Views
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as topic
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with topic management privileges can see it.
    • rcfaR
      rcfa
      last edited by

      I'm quite happy performance wise with my newly set up SG-2340/MBT-4220.

      There's only one fly in the ointment: 2GB RAM.

      Really, I'd rather have 4GB or even 8GB.
      And none of the other small scale systems offer it, and the bigger systems are overkill.

      While CPU power is the key thing for business use (throughput), I don't care about reaching GB speeds, when I'm lucky to get reliably 50mbit up and down from my ISP.

      On the other hand, particularly with IPv6 and hopefully the end of NAT as we know it, things like virus filtering, proxy servers, SNORT, content filtering, etc. become more important, and they all suck up RAM.

      So my little new systems at worst peak at 30% CPU, usually less than 10%, but RAM usage is anywhere between 60-90% at all times, and swap is being used.
      e.g. currently the Dashboard indicates 61% of 2GB RAM used, and 35% of 4GB swap used, and at this point I have barely set up SNORT and filtering.

      SG-1100: probably more than enough CPU power for my needs, but with only 1GB RAM, certainly not enough RAM
      SG-3100: only 2GB RAM, so same predicament

      So until you go up to the SG-5100 which both in CPU power and price at $700+ is overkill for a typical home setup, you have a RAM bottleneck, not a CPU bottleneck in the systems currently available.
      Not sure if you're using SoC components that don't allow for more RAM, but something needs to be done in that department, otherwise only a fraction of the functionality pfSense offers can be meaningfully be used with these, or so it seems.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
      • First post
        Last post
      Copyright 2025 Rubicon Communications LLC (Netgate). All rights reserved.