Re: FW-1 throughput question

[Darren Reed <darrenr () reed wattle id au>]

In some email I received from Aaron Turner, sie wrote:
> The part of the Solaris kernel that routes packets (FW-1 is a router) is
> single threaded.  Hence, max throughput is determined more by the speed of
> the CPU than the number of CPU's.  Two CPU's is probably the sweet spot in
> terms of price/performance for sites needing a lot of throughput.  (The
> other CPU would be dedicated to other OS/Firewall tasks such as logging.)

Hmmm.  What makes you believe it is single threaded ?  I've not seen any
evidence which would support that theory.  I've definately seen crashes
where there have been numerous threads coming up through hmeread().  One
CPU per interface.

Darren