Best way to measure performance ?

[lowprofile]

Hi

How do you guys make some performance test? e.x troughput?

What is best practice? It sounds very noob, i know. But how do you test it? Direct on firewall or host? (after firewall)
How many milliseconds do you "loose" after having a jump though firewall?  0 ?

thanks in advance!

[stephenw10]

What most people want to know is the throughput of the box. I.e. 'If I have a 200Mbps WAN connection can hardware X pass that?'.

To test that you need a box on both sides that is at least as fast as the pfSense box. A popular test is utility for this is iperf, it's inclufed in pfSense so you can use 3 pfSense boxes to test but it's also available for other OSs. Run it as a server on a box on one side of the box under test and as a client on a box on the other side. Test the throughput. Test it in the other direction. This artificial test will give you a nice comparable number but real world bi-directional, multi-connection traffic will be different to some extent.

Steve

[lowprofile]

@stephenw10:

What most people want to know is the throughput of the box. I.e. 'If I have a 200Mbps WAN connection can hardware X pass that?'.

To test that you need a box on both sides that is at least as fast as the pfSense box. A popular test is utility for this is iperf, it's inclufed in pfSense so you can use 3 pfSense boxes to test but it's also available for other OSs. Run it as a server on a box on one side of the box under test and as a client on a box on the other side. Test the throughput. Test it in the other direction. This artificial test will give you a nice comparable number but real world bi-directional, multi-connection traffic will be different to some extent.

Steve

Thanks, i will try using iperf as instructed.  :)