About pfSense Router Guide
pfSense Router Guide is about one question: what hardware a pfSense firewall actually needs, and why the published minimum is not the answer. That covers state table and inspection memory, packets-per-second versus headline bandwidth, VPN cipher acceleration, the CE and Plus release trains, and the diagnostic order for a firewall that is slower than its link.
It is for people specifying or rescuing a firewall appliance and trying to avoid both under-buying and chasing the wrong bottleneck. Figures are taken from Netgate's own sizing and tuning documentation, its published version tables, and vendor specifications, each cited on the page that uses it.
What is covered here
- Editions
- Security
- Throughput
- Troubleshooting
- Workload Sizing
5 articles are published so far. New articles are announced on the RSS feed; there is no fixed publishing schedule and this site does not promise one.
The appliance sizer
Alongside the articles there is one interactive tool: the pfSense appliance sizer. It turns a target WAN speed, an expected state count and an inspection level into a memory figure and a core-count tier, and prints the Netgate tables and the arithmetic it uses directly underneath, so the estimate can be checked rather than trusted. It runs entirely in the browser, needs no signup, and records nothing.
How these articles are produced
Articles are researched from primary sources: vendor and project documentation, published standards and specifications, release notes, advisories, and measurements published by the people who took them. Drafts are produced with AI assistance and then edited against those same sources before anything is published. Where a figure comes from a datasheet or a third-party measurement, the article names the source and links to it so you can check the original rather than take this site's summary of it.
Everything here is published under the pfSense Router Guide Editorial byline. That is an editorial desk, not a person, and no article on this site claims hands-on lab testing, benchmarking, or first-hand measurement. Nothing here should be read as a report of something this site physically tested.
Corrections
Getting it right matters more than getting it first. If something on this site is wrong, out of date, or missing the source it should cite, email editor@pfsenserouter.com with the page and the specific claim. Substantive corrections are made on the page itself rather than quietly dropped.
How this site is funded
This site currently runs no affiliate links, no sponsored content, no paid placement, and no display advertising. Nothing on it earns a commission. If that changes, this page and the disclosure page will say so before any such link appears.
The full position is on the disclosure page. Read it before acting on anything here that reads like a buying recommendation.
Related sites
pfSense Router Guide is run alongside a small number of other single-topic sites:
- pfSenseLab - pfSense and pfSense Plus configuration for homelabs.
- OPNsenseLab - OPNsense guides, configs, and hardware for serious homelabs.
- WireGuardLab - WireGuard protocol and deployment guides
Contact
Email: editor@pfsenserouter.com
Site: pfsenserouter.com
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