Does pFsense support web caching?

Question

I am thinking of installing pFsense at home. Basically, one of my main goals is to increase the concurrent connections. Some people here are using Bittorrent all day long and as you might know it takes a lot of concurrent connections.

Since I will install it on a machine with good hardware (that's Core 2 Duo, 4GB and 320GB hard drive), I believe this will increase my concurrent connections to something like 30k (compared to my Linksys E3000 which I assume can be about 500).

I am assuming this will help me browse the internet, gaming etc even while some are downloading at home near full speed.

Also, since I will be having a 320GB hard disk, I want to implement web caching (to cache websites like YouTube videos). Can this be found in pFsense?

Answer 1

In answer to your "main" question, Yes.

pfSense does support web caching. Assuming you are using pfSense 2, it has an optional Squid module that will do what you require. I suggest you research about Squid. The implementation in pfSense it is not as functional because pfSense is supposed to be user friendly, and not all the options are available via the GUI for the Squid plugin within pfSense, but Squid is very powerful. It might be worth install pfSense in a virtual, and install Squid outside of this, so you can use it to it's full potential.

Regarding your question on more simultaneous questions, yes pfSense will also be able to handle more simultenoues questions as your given spec is greater than the linksys router. This is some what tunable also via the pfSense GUI.

Finally, if you want to browse the Internet and game whilst downloading at near full speed, this is not a case of how many simultaneous connections your edge device can handle, but more QoS related. pfSense has support for QoS and so you could QoS HTTP/S traffic, for example above other traffic. This would be quite fiddly though to factor in game traffic unless the games you play have easily matchable traffic patterns.

Since pfSense is built partly on the BSD tool pf, you might be better off logging into your new pfSense box and using pf directly to attain a more granular control over QoS et all although the version of BSD running under pfSense is a stripped out version so you milage may vary here.

Answer 2

It looks like pFSense can use squid as a cache server. There are instructions on how to do it on the pFsense website.