PFSense in a home environment

Right. So years ago I had a linux box acting as a gateway for internet that was running Mandrake 8.2(I Think) and Squid. With this box if I were to download lets say Nvidia drivers I would get them at internet speed (500kb/s) when my flatmate needed the same Nvidia drivers he would get them at Lan speed (10-14Mb/s).

These days I run a pfsense box and the content of the internet has changed a great deal. The internet is a more dynamic beast and so less able to be squid cached. PFSense is different to the mandrake install I had many years ago.

The major issue I have is that the PFSense box has never delivered the kind of speeds that I used to see from my old mandrake box. I cannot be certain if this is the changing internet or if PFsense is different in its delivery of content or more likely the thing is acting as a 'accelerator' for the a enterprise environment where it would be accelerating content coming from servers behind it.

All the tutorials I have seen are very unclear on which way traffic is being cached.

Would love to see a video explaining a home setup and possible ways of benchmarking the state of the proxy.

 

Thanks Guys.

I find the caching to be pretty much useless in a home environment. If you have a ton of users then there is some benefit to it but with only a few users you're more likely to see a loss of performance than a gain.

 

Have you tried running pfSense with all the installed packages stopped?

I don't actually have many packages installed on it, so there is not much to stop.

I'll have a look at doing some testing along those lines when I can. Need to submit a change log to the girlfriend about a possible internet outage.