On 2/9/07, krt <kkrrtt at gmail dot com> wrote:
>
<excellent explanation snipped>
>
> Of course, neither method works if you have just too much bandwidth for
> the box to handle.
>

That's the key here. It seems a lot of the time people expect miracles
out of a general purpose OS on weak hardware.

Polling also has the benefit of keeping the webGUI somewhat responsive
if you're completely overloading your hardware. Like I'm currently
using a 4501 as my perimeter firewall (had put in something much
faster but I blew it up and haven't had time to fix it yet), on a 15
Mb cable modem - it can't quite push 15 Mb. With relatively high pps
(packets per second) rates, like BitTorrent traffic, it's essentially
DoS'ed (extremely interrupt flooded) at around 12 Mb, 2000+ pps.
webGUI is completely dead. With polling, the webGUI is really really
slow, but it works. It's not a whole lot faster, network throughput
wise, though.

-Chris