700 Throughput?

[dwright1542]

If I enable squid, I can only push 7Meg thru the 700.   Without, I get the full 16Meg from my cable modem.   

Any thoughts on increasing that?

[Davesworld]

That seems awfully low. Tell us more about the system such as how much ram you have, whether you are using a CF or HD install, the actual processor speed (my 500's came underclocked at 300mhz) and any proxy addons you may have. One of these units at 450mhz with none of the bells and whistles turned on was shown to throughput 94mbs through the firewall. That's pretty much line speed since you will never pass a full 100mbs through any 10/100 nic just by themselves.

Things like Squid depending on how it is set up, can eat memory and bring your system to a crawl, if using a CF install, use the minimum amount of cache allowed and a 256MB of ram as a bare minimum starting point. Squid will always try to keep the most important cache in ram, digging cache from a drive would really be too slow to be of much use except huge files until you get cache corruption. I no longer run squid transparently because it totally messes up Shoutcast streams. Many of us use Squid only as a redirector for adblocking and such and set the browser to the proxy manually. I used it a lot 5 years ago but soon realized that the internet is too dynamic, even with a 300MB cache, I only averaged a tiny amount of cache hits per hour, the majority were misses. Your cable company likely already has a local cache in your neighborhood if that helps any.

Snort is also a real memory hog as well and will use 100MB of ram per monitored interface thanks to a bloated rules list as of the latest Sourcefire rules update. The maximum amount of ram I have managed to use in the 3000 series is 1GB. I have put two 1GB sticks in and still each slot only sees and uses 512MB of it. By 3000 series, we are speaking of the Qube3, Raq3,4, Velociraptor 500 700 1000 and 1100.

The Raq550 (one of the two in the 5000 series) can take substantially more ram but it has to be ECC. I have one of the less common 1266mhz 550's here but do not use it as a daily firewall appliance. It is way over cooled and 10000rpm fans need to be replaced with something closer to sanity. I can't be in the same room for long with it.