The goal of this paper is to propose a testing procedure for selected intrusion prevention systems (IPS) in a realistic network traffic in terms of their suitability on a given hardware microcomputers for low-performance devices for internet of things (IoT). We perform an IPS research in terms of resource usage in order to establish a universal procedure of checking, whether a given microcomputer controlling IoT devices (often in overloaded state) can additionally burden the installation and start-up of IPS. The experiment is repeated on several boards under overload condition to determine the maximum data rate, above which transmission degrades. The presented testing method is an exemplary tool for IoT applications concerning the security of embedded devices with low performance.