Maximum sessions guidance?

beaven67 · Feb 9, 2011, 7:09 PM

I'm looking for what the max limit for sessions are on pfsense. I know it has a lot to do with Hardware specs and the type of traffic as well but in general is there some hard limit?
Can the firewall support 500,000 sessions or more?
Thanks,

jimp · Feb 10, 2011, 7:40 PM

It's completely dependent on how much RAM you have. 1 state == 1k of RAM. You can adjust the size of the state table under System > Advanced.

To do 500,000 sessions, you'd just need ~512MB of RAM just for states, not counting other system processes, so to be safe you might say ~768MB-1GB+ for that level.

The rest is a factor of CPU and motherboard speed in terms of bandwidth/throughput and such. It's not as easy as saying "x sessions".

beaven67 · Feb 10, 2011, 8:26 PM

Thanks,
I knew the 1k=1 state baseline but Has anyone got pfsense running around 500,000 session in a production environment?
Thanks,

jimp · Feb 10, 2011, 8:29 PM

I've heard of people with 1M+ states. It's possible as long as you have the hardware to handle the load, and the bandwidth and number of users to make that many. :-)

cmb · Feb 11, 2011, 3:44 AM

@beaven67:

I knew the 1k=1 state baseline but Has anyone got pfsense running around 500,000 session in a production environment?

Yes, many.

I've personally gotten a 2.0 amd64 install up to around 15-16 million states.