Firewall Speed

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2006-05-18 11:03, bc <bc3910 at pcisys.net> wrote:
> I want to run 6.1_RELEASE with Packet Filter(PF) configured as
> a gateway using 2 identical 10/100 nics, on an old 450mhz
> pentium with 256 meg ram and an 8 gig HD.
>
> In general, should I expect any speed performance issues with
> internet access base on the processor, ram and bus speeds of
> the MB?  Would the PF config cause any speed performance
> deficiencies?
>
> I had same setup as above but with IPF firewall and received
> complaints about surfing speed so I put them back on a Linksys
> router firewall.

We'd have to see the ruleset to be able to reply in an informed
manner.  I have seen firewalls doing both filtering & NAT on a
system, with almost no overhead at all though.

This top output:

	http://keramida.serverhive.com/pixelshow-top.txt

shows that a FreeBSD 5.X system with 256 MB of physical memory is
happily filtering the traffic and doing NAT for more than 100
users, while still being 97% idle.