pfSense

Jim,

Thanks for the feedback. Please note that the performance drop occurs even when all items (not just pf states) in the System Information widget. That suggests hiding items is only a display feature and does not actually eliminate the underlying calculations. Separate issue?

... above should be when all are hidden.

That is correct, hiding items does not stop the data from being collected. Hiding a whole widget would, but not specific pieces of data inside a given widget. That isn't a bug, it's just how the widgets were designed and a side effect of how they fetch data. Whether or not an item is displayed is cosmetic only at that point.

But since the System Information widget can't ever be removed -- that means its performance penalty is fixed for the Dashboard. That's unfortunate. I hope this is much improved in 21.09 for the SG-3100 -- 200Mbps penalty is a whopper.

That has always been the case and likely always will be -- just the fact that you're hitting the dashboard and constantly polling PHP and nginx will reduce performance because that consumes CPU, sometimes significant amounts. There is never going to be a way around that. If you want peak performance, don't keep the dashboard open.

optimization:
https://gitlab.netgate.com/pfSense/pfSense/-/merge_requests/345

B D wrote in #note-5:

But since the System Information widget can't ever be removed -- that means its performance penalty is fixed for the Dashboard. That's unfortunate. I hope this is much improved in 21.09 for the SG-3100 -- 200Mbps penalty is a whopper.

You can test the fix by applying the patch ID 136c1462b64e0b132e090849712c5a4007b42e5d
using the System Patches pkg: https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/development/system-patches.html

Tested in 22.01. Could be placebo but I noticed a 3-4x CPU usage drop after removing the System Information widget.