We therefore strongly recommend purchasing Intel cards, or systems with built-in Intel NICs up to 1Gbps. NICs based on Intel chipsets tend to be the best performing and most reliable when used with pfSense software. When using pfSense software to protect your wireless network or segment multiple LAN segments, throughput between interfaces becomes more important than throughput to the WAN interface(s). A quality NIC can substantially increase system throughput. Inexpensive NICs can saturate your CPU with interrupt handling, causing missed packets and your CPU to be the bottleneck. Selection of network cards (NICs) is often the single most important performance factor in your setup.

Requirements Specific to Individual Platforms: You may be able to get by with less than the minimum, but with less memory you may start swapping to disk, which will dramatically slow down your system. Note the minimum requirements are not suitable for all environments. The following outlines the minimum hardware requirements for pfSense software version 2.x.

PfSense Hardware Requirements and Guidance Snort and ntop are two that should not be installed on a system with less than 1GB RAM. Packages - Some of the packages increase RAM requirements significantly. For large environments requiring state tables with several hundred thousand connections, or millions of connections, ensure adequate RAM is available. For example, a firewall with 1 GB of RAM will default to 100,000 states which when full would use about 100 MB of RAM. The default state table size is calculated based on 10% of the available RAM in the firewall. Large State Tables - State table entries require about 1 KB of RAM each.

AES-NI acceleration of IPsec significantly reduces CPU requirements on platforms that support it.Ĭaptive Portal - While the primary concern is typically throughput, environments with hundreds of simultaneous captive portal users (of which there are many) will require slightly more CPU power than recommended above. The number of connections is much less of a concern than the throughput required. Encrypting and decrypting traffic is CPU intensive. VPN - Heavy use of any of the VPN services included in the pfSense software will increase CPU requirements.

Most features do not factor into hardware sizing, although a few will have a significant impact on hardware utilization: The following outlines the best practices for choosing the appliance best suitable for your environment.

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