I think you are referring to them adding the Cavium offload engine in the processor that wasn't being utilized yet. It had the promise of doubling the speeds. Here are two more things to try:
Go into services > intrusion prevention > snort config and comment out
include $PREPROC_RULE_PATH/sensitive-data.rules
down at the bottom. They only generate alerts (not drops) anyway and lighten the load on snort and the processor.
Also, go into /etc/init.d/ntpclient and change your box to update the clock sync to weekly. It's set to go online and sync every 10 minutes and then restart the ntpclient. Also excessive in my opinion:
...
cron_seed() {
local cronstuff='40 3 * * 0'
I'll start a different thread so everyone can share their hacks. Just curious, why didn't you use Snort on your pfSense box as it's an official package on it?
Running the latest OpenWrt stable release