What PF tuning parameters are recommended for firewall deployments in a large environment? I have an HP DL380/G7 running FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE-p3/AMD64. The system has ten NIC's, 4 x HP NC382i, 2 x Intel PRO/1000, and four Intel PRO/10GbE ports. The following tuning parameters are in /etc/sysctl.conf. The system passes traffic with no delays or lost connections with the firewall rules disabled but connectivity through the firewall is sporadic with the firewall rules enabled. This sporadic behavior was seen with TCP, UDP, and ICMP. Traffic would ingress one interface but the traffic would not appear on the egress interface. The pf statistics showed state table searches of 25,104 per second.
Code:
hw.syscons.kbd_reboot=0
debug.debugger_on_panic=0
hw.intr_storm_threshold=9000
kern.ipc.nmbjumbo9=100000
kern.ipc.nmbjumbo16=32000
# The next parameter is set in /boot/loader.conf
# kern.ipc.nmbclusters=190000
kern.ipc.nmbjumbop=500000
kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=1048576
vm.kstack_cache_size=512
# kern.ipc.maxsockets=80000