Load Testing & Performance Measurement of pfSense

[DJMelvin]

Hello Everybody,

I'm New to the forum. Firstly I'd like to thank all the contributor for making pfSense such a great firewall to be deployed in my small organization. :D Great work.

Recently I'm keen to write some tutorial on how to perform standard load test on pfSense and measure it's performance under a certain load. Does anybody have any idea how to perform such task on the firewall itself? It will be very interesting to observe how pfSense will behave based on given load.

I'll be looking forward for suggestion on how this work can be done, please feel free to reply  ;)

Thanks  :P

[dreamslacker]

I don't suppose there is any real means to doing this owing to the versatility of pfsense.  There are many packages available and they will present a different load to the system depending on the hardware.
eg.  A VIA/ Alix might outperform an Atom/ Celeron-L when there are connections utilizing certain encryption algorithms simply because of the onboard decryption chipsets.  However, the latter would outperform the former for pure throughput so on and so forth.

Not to mention, there are simply too many scenarios for a single suite of tests to give accurate results.  Some users just need pure routing throughput, some heavily use VPN connections and some deploy the box as a load-balancer/ reverse proxy.