Traffic Shaping

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...