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Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:35:14 +0200 (CEST)
From: Wojciech Puchar <wojtek@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl>
To: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk>
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	<484EA9AE.2010407@infracaninophile.co.uk>
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Cc: FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: firewall high-load performance
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> High load may or may not be a problem depending on your traffic patterns.
> I've seen pf firewalls suffer by running out of state-table space in
> situations where there are a lot of fairly short-lived but low volume
> network connections.  The default is 10,000 states.  If your firewall machine


is this state-table a hash table or something similar. if so - making it 
much bigger than CPU cache may actually slow down things because DRAM 
access latency is huge on modern machines.

> On the whole I'd go with pf every time simply based on how much more
> manageable it is compared to ipfw -- you have to try, hard, to lock
> yourself out when reloading a new pf ruleset.

i already learned well locking myself after making mistake in ipfw rules

now i run screen and do something like that

cd /etc
cp firewall firewall.old
cp firewall firewall.new
<edit> firewall.new
cp firewall.new firewall;/etc/rc.d/ipfw restart;sleep 100;cp firewall.old firewall;/etc/rc.d/ipfw restart

then i have 100 seconds to quickly test new rules, at least to make sure 
i'm not locked.