Making pfsense faster
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Hardware is SO cheap these days that griping about performance on an almost archaic P3 machine is silly. Given that an off the shelf firewall with similar features/performance to pfsense will cost you thousands of dollars you might better serve your organization by doing some education on what things really cost rather than wasting time trying to squeeze more blood from a stone. If you want good performance invest in good hardware.
EDIT :: For reference I still use a handful of P3 systems in critical applications without any trouble. However with traffic sometimes maxing my gigabit fiber connection my firewall isnt a place where I try to save money. It is THE MOST CRITICAL point of my network. For those with less demanding requirements less hardware will certainly do. I recently picked up a Dell poweredge server with dual p3-1.4ghz cpus and 2 gig of ram for 300 dollars. Even has a gig-e ethernet port and raid controller in it. Hard to go wrong with these machines. If you're on a budget look on ebay and you might be surprised at the class of machine that you can get for the money. Some of them even still have warranty coverage. Be sure to check the service tags on their support site.