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I am trying to benchmark an ASA under various conditions but what is throwing me off is my baseline seems to be odd. I am trying to load an ASA to full capacity. See the attached topology diagram:

Topology

The players are:

  • C1 a Linux client runs a continuous download of a 300 GB file and loops this from S1, a Linux server running HTTPD.
  • C2 a Linux client also runs a continuous download of a 300 GB file and loops this from S2, a Linux server running HTTPD.
  • C3 runs AB to try and generate more connections. ab -n100 -c99999999 http://10.0.0.57/ This is to S3, a Linux server running HTTPD.
  • Cisco ASA 5520 running 8.4.

What I found odd was that even with all this going on the max I saw was just over 500 Mbps (observed via NLOAD on both VM box physical interfaces). Is this normal? Everything is Gig. Some questions:

  • Is it likely that my crappy Linux desk switch is bottlenecking?
  • Does NATing really kill performance that bad or is something else going on? The CPU on the Dispatch Process was 30% under load.
  • Is this is likely a disk issue as the servers are simply reading the file as fast as they can?
  • What I found odd was that C1 would not transfer at it's full speed until I had it download 3 copies of the file from S1 at once (about 250 Mbps at this point). Why are 3 parallel downloads from S1 faster than a single download? Shouldn't S1 send as quick as it possibly can?

Is there a better way to load test network equipment. Downloading a single large file does not seem realistic. I am trying to simulate a busy network doing web things and load the ASA to capacity.

jdoe
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1 Answers1

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I recommend the following for simulating network traffic.

Isolating segments could help identify bottlenecks such as your unmanaged switch.

ACLs with logging enabled or IPSec encryption can reduce throughput.

Transfer behavior differences between single and parallel downloads may be the result of network driver behavior rather than available bandwidth in the network.

TDurden
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