You have to remember they're based on different kernels. Driver support 
for your NICs and whether or not polling is enabled might be at fault.

Harri Hyyppa wrote:
> We had some testing with monowall 1.21  (generic-pc) and pfsense 
> (whatever (1.0.beta1?)).
>
> Throughput with same equipment was somewhat interesting.
>
> With m0n0wall we got 10-12 Mbit/s, with pfsense we got 90-100 Mbit/s. 
> Is there something that we did wrong with m0n0wall or is pfsense that 
> much better? (Lan performance, bridged performance was almost same on 
> either one)
>

-- 

Alex Neuman van der Hans
N&K Technology Consultants
Tel. +507 214-9002 - http://nkpanama.com/