Hello
I am currently running pfSense on a Dell 3020 Micro with an i3-4160 and 8GB of RAM. This was absolutely fine with a 100/10 connection, however now I am on 400/40, and after saturating it for 2 minutes the CPU in the box hit 70C and pfSense hard crashed to the point where I needed to reboot the machine.
I do have an Intel NUC D54250WYK (i5-4250U) and a Gigabyte BRIX GB-BXi5-4200 (i5-4200U), both with 16GB of RAM, and I think these may be more than enough to run that connection maxed out without running into CPU issues, however I want your verdict on this. And yes I know this hardware is very overkill for pfSense, its just what I have on hand, if I go for one of these I’ll likely salvage the RAM from the current box (8GB) and swap it out because pfSense with 16GB of RAM is just silly.
Would you say either of those will be fine to run that connection without too much overheating, or should I invest in another box for pfSense (power efficiency is my primary objective here, so I aint about to build a 1U just for this, hence the mini PCs).
Cheers
What’s your WAN connection type? I’d expect the CPU issue if you are using PPPoE, but not with static or DHCP.