Hello Chris,

Thursday, May 5, 2005, 3:16:03 PM, you wrote:

> On 5/4/05, Scott Nasuta <tcslv at cox dot net> wrote:
>> 
>> > 5.3 and 5.4 and pfSense are actually slower than m0n0wall and 5.3 by
>> > about 900 Kbps on a 4501 (11.4 vs. 10.5 Mbps), and similar percentages
>> > on WRAP and 4801.  5.4 brought no improvement over 5.3.  PF does
>> > handle more sessions a lot better than ipf though, it seems, though
>> > it's extremely unsteady.
>> 
>> I wonder how "Real World" these throughput results portray. There is
>> MUCH more to firewall performance than just throughput test. Latency
>> is a big part as is the performance decrease of increasing rules.
>> 

> <snip>

Thanks for the indepth reply. I especially like the charts. I never
knew it to be that dramatic just from my limited "seat of pants"
testing of downloading.

I would LOVE to get a hold of one of those expensive network testing
machines that can simulate 100's of clients through a network device
and put all the freely available firewall projects through the
testing. The kind of rigorous testing that networkworld does for their
reviews. Something like this: http://www.phoenixdatacom.com/ixia.html

But for now we make do with the test results we DO have like your and
go from there.

Thanks again.



-- 
Best regards,
 Scott                            mailto:tcslv at cox dot net