CPU Recommendations for pfSense VM (1Gbps WAN/LAN, no NIC passthrough)

tomashk

New Member
Jan 29, 2025
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Hi everyone,

I'm looking for some advice on choosing the right CPU for a pfSense VM running on Proxmox. My goal is to handle around 1Gbps of traffic between WAN and LAN, with fq_codel for traffic shaping.

The catch is that I won't be using NIC passthrough. Instead, I'll be relying on virtio for the network interfaces. As far as I understand, virtio in pfSense doesn't support multiqueue (please correct me if I'm wrong!), which means a single CPU core will likely be responsible for handling all the network traffic.

I'm aiming for a balance between performance and power consumption. If you have experience with similar setups, I'd love to hear your recommendations.

If you don't have a specific CPU model in mind, perhaps you could suggest a way to estimate the required CPU power? Are there any key parameters I should be looking at when comparing CPUs?

Thanks in advance for your help!