# Advice needed to set up FreeBSD router



## alie (Oct 9, 2014)

Hi,

I need advice to build a FreeBSD router with a minimum of 6 NICs which can serve 1000 users with an internal Squid cache. Anyone have same experience here? If yes, please share your hardware configuration here.

Thanks in advance.


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## Jeckt (Oct 10, 2014)

I don't have a setup anywhere near that level, but I will recommend looking into two quad-port Intel NIC cards for networking. Squid depends a lot on how you configure it, what your users do, and how many do that. Keeping more objects in RAM is obvious, but with that many users I think you'll want a dedicated SSD for the squid on disk cache no matter how much RAM you have. If the usage is too heavy, you might want to consider a multi server setup using WCCP to coordinate the caches.


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## dpejesh (Oct 11, 2014)

If you're looking for a decent 1U DIY type of solution then Soekris builds some nice products.  The 6501 can be expanded to 8-ports and supports 2x m-sata SSD drives.  They're a bit expensive but I've got a few of them that have been rock solid so far which as @Jeckt said, depending on your users usage patterns and what exactly you want to cache, could possibly be a good fit.


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## alie (Oct 15, 2014)

Seems good 1U system but the CPU very limited. Do you have any benchmark for the system like throughput in mpps?


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