Regardless of the size or purpose of your network, and regardless of your budget, you will derive benefits from optimizing the performance of your network. You have already taken a step in the right direction by learning about pfSense and, in previous chapters, we discussed some ways to improve performance, such as setting up our own DNS server and optimizing firewall rules. Another way to improve performance is to enable traffic shaping on our network. Without traffic shaping, network traffic is processed on a first-in, first-out (FIFO) basis. While, in some cases, this form of traffic management is adequate, it is far from optimal, and can lead to connections becoming saturated, which, in turn, causes buffering and increased latency. Traffic shaping, also known as quality of service (QoS), is a form of bandwidth management in which network traffic is made to conform with a traffic profile. The purpose of this is to improve performance, as well as reduce latency and increase usable bandwidth.

In this chapter, we will first cover some fundamental concepts of traffic shaping. We then will demonstrate how to use pfSense's built-in traffic shaper to optimize network performance. The traffic shaper has its own wizard that makes it easy to set up traffic shaping, but sometimes we need to manually configure traffic shaping and add our own traffic shaping rules, and we will discuss how to do that. Finally, on occasion, the built-in traffic shaper does not meet our requirements, and we will introduce a third-party solution—Snort—that goes beyond what the base pfSense installation can do.

In this chapter, we will cover the following:

• Traffic shaping fundamentals
• Configuring traffic shaping
• Manual rule configuration
• Using Snort for traffic shaping
• Troubleshooting