Hello,

To follow up on my rants about the net4501 slowness, for what its worth I
figured I'd wrap it up with these findings and conclusions:

>>>
system.php takes 1 minutes 15 seconds to load with current settings.

Factory defaults: 25 seconds. Wonder what it is about my config that is
making it go so slow?

When OPT1 is added, system.php takes 50 seconds. After bridging with WAN,
time seemed to decrease. Now I'm thinking it had something to do with the
hardware watchdog or the device polling, both of which are now disabled.

I think that the slowness has something to do with the fact that I have a
VPN setup through a filtered bridge. This will cause a shell to drop when I
run commands like dmesg, ifconfig, or ps -A. This likely causes fragmented
packets, which I guess are harder for the firewall to manage. I was able to
improve the responsiveness of the net4501, but then the shell drops appeared
again. I then restored to an earlier configuration, and the shells are fine
again, but the responsiveness is slow slow slow, around 1 minute per page
load.
<<<

Unfortunately I don't have the time to more rigorously test the setup to
find out where the hangup is, but my personal conclusion is that I have two
options:

* faster net4501 that can't handle a vpn connection across two bridged
interfaces
* slower net4501 that can handle a vpn connection across two bridged
interfaces

Obviously I chose the latter, as I don't use the net4501 webgui everyday.
Furthermore, I just purchased a couple net4801's, and I'll replace the
filtered bridge with the 4801 so it can handle the fragmented packets
better.

The net4501 is still a great box for the price, I just won't use it as a
filtered bridge.

Lastly, I definitely retract what I said about the slowness being due to a
php upgrade on the latest monowall, that definitely wasn't it!


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