pf performance?

[Erich Weiler]

> The pf isn't a process, so you can't see it in top. pf has some helper
> threads however, but packet processing isn't performed by any of them.

But the work pf does would show up in 'system' on top right?  So if I 
see all my CPUs tied up 100% in 'interrupts' and very little 'system', 
would it be a reasonable assumption to think that if I got more CPU 
cores to handle the interrupts that eventually I would see 'system' load 
increase as the interrupt load became faster to be handled?  And thus 
increase my bandwidth?

In other words, until I see like 100% system usage in one core, I would 
have room to grow?

Sorry for being dense, just trying to squeeze every ounce of blood out 
of this box that I can...  ;)  Unfortunately I can't move to FreeBSD 10 
because this is a pfSense box and they are locked on 8.1 at the moment 
for the version I'm running.  They are eyeing version 10 for a future 
release but it may be a year or more before that gets released.