Tuning for full blown PCs

[cyruspy]

Hi, are there any known "best practices" when installing pfsense in full blown PCs?, i'll install it in a Dell Optiplex GX760, C2D with 2GB of RAM. Are there any kernel parameters to adjust?, i'll be running VPNs, regular firewalling and Proxy/Antivirus.

[autobot]

With that hardware you should be able to handle quite a few simultaneous clients, I don't believe any tweaking need be done to the kernel parameters.

[cyruspy]

I've seen some posts about setting this parameters (taken from my old notes):

kern.ipc.nmbclusters
kern.maxfiles
kern.maxfilesperproc
net.inet.ip.portrange.last

They're no longer needed?

[jahonix]

They are not used that often and are hardly known.

[cyruspy]

But "hardly known" != "useless"…. I found this: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,14673.0.html

Any comments?

[mhab12]

The issues that loader.conf can cause/resolve are so pronounced that you would HAVE to modify it to even use the router at all.  If you're seeing >10% of your bandwidth come through the pfSense box/proxy, then you're likely not affected.  Most of the issues have been corrected with more recent versions of the squid package as well as bumps in the underlying FreeBSD versions.