RE: PIX-515 acceptable CPU usage?

["Eugene Kuznetsov" <eugene () datapower com>]

> Some time ago cisco Documentation used to say that if your 
> PIX firewall is running at 30% sustained utilization then 
> an upgrade is advised. The latest

It is worth noting that for many network device products, it is difficult
for the vendor to provide a really accurate CPU utilization metric. There
may be custom hardware assist, multiple processors, NPUs, and so on. It is
not easy to reduce all of that to a single percentage.

Also, such numbers are rarely linear. In other words, if a device is at 30%
utilization right now, 2x more traffic won't drive it to 60% -- it may be
40% or 100%, depending on the internal architecture. 

Some less ethical vendors will actually fudge their utilization metrics as a
competitive tactic, i.e. "look, we're only at 5% utilization while
saturating the network". 

So it's a useful basic health check, but be careful in placing too much
trust in CPU utilization numbers, in PIX or elsewhere. 

\\ Eugene Kuznetsov, Chairman & CTO  : eugene () datapower com 
\\ DataPower Technology, Inc.        : Web Services security 
\\ http://www.datapower.com          : XML-aware networks   

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