From: "Jon R. Allen" <[email protected]> wrote on
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 22:18:37 -0400
I would like to compare firewall performance levels with other people to
see if the rates we are experiencing are "normal". I manage a pair of
Sun Ultra E3500 firewalls each connected to a burstable-T3. Each firewall
has a pair of 250Mhz CPUs, 512M of memory, and is connected to full-duplex
100Mbps switches. The OS level is Solaris 2.6 and the Checkpoint is 3.0B.
Even though each link has 45Mbps capacity, we seem to topping out in
the 6-7Mbps range. The systems have been tuned and tweaked and nothing
seems to indicate a "tuning" or resource problem. The firewalls have about
40 firewall rules and about 10 address translation rules.
Using a traffic generator I tried to do some throughput testing.
Transmitting
small packets, I can drive the performance at about 2Mbps, but with large
packets I can drive performance in the 15mbps range. During the busy times
of the day the average packet size is quite small, so this seems to agree
with the testing.
Do other people with similar setups see similar rates? Management believes
that the E3500 boxes should be able to drive the T3 links much higher than
6Mbps. Therefore I would like to see what transmission rates other people
are
seeing. Does the trunking feature help performance? How about switching
from E3500 to something like E220? Any info would be appreciated. Thanks.
-Jon
