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Date:      Mon, 22 Nov 2004 21:16:47 +0100
From:      Max Laier <max@love2party.net>
To:        freebsd-net@freebsd.org
Cc:        Pawel Malachowski <pawmal-posting@freebsd.lublin.pl>
Subject:   Re: Large NAT: ipf/ipnat, pf - opinions?
Message-ID:  <200411222117.35177.max@love2party.net>
In-Reply-To: <20041122182912.GA33296@shellma.zin.lublin.pl>
References:  <20041122182912.GA33296@shellma.zin.lublin.pl>

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On Monday 22 November 2004 19:29, Pawel Malachowski wrote:
>  I'm interested in opinions/comparisons how ipnat and pf perform
> on FreeBSD 5.x in real working large NAT setups (about 50Mbit/s, few
> thousands of workstations, 300k of mappings or more). Problems noticed,
> memory and CPU consumption, mbufs utilization etc.

While the state information in pf is slightly larger than that of ipfilter=
=20
(and thus the memory consumption). pf offers many functionalities that make=
=20
it the "easier-to-manage" tool. There are also a couple of optimizations in=
=20
pf that should make it perform better, but only measuring your specific=20
application can tell you which is the better for you. I'd guess that pf can=
=20
lift the load described above with an average workstation (good NICs and=20
plenty of RAM provided). Note, however, that for CPU consumption packets pe=
r=20
second is the important factor. For pf - with it's stateful inspection -=20
connection initialization has some meaning as well (once established, passi=
ng=20
more traffic through a connection is cheap).

Depending on your application, you might find pf's TABLES which greatly=20
improve management of large IP-sets. There are also many options to fine-tu=
ne=20
the number of concurrent states that a (NAT)rule can create. This helps to=
=20
keep down memory consumption during DDoS-Attacks. The additional "adaptive=
=20
timeouts" can also help to manage load peaks.

That is comparing pf 3.5 (what is in RELENG_5) with ipfilter 3.x (also in=20
RELENG_5). ipfilter 4.x has gained some, but isn't included in FreeBSD.

=2D-=20
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