How can I speed up Shorewall start (restart)?
Using a light-weight shell such as ash or dash can dramatically decrease the time required to start or restart Shorewall. See the SHOREWALL_SHELL variable in shorewall.conf . Use a fast terminal emulator — in particular the KDE konsole scrolls much faster than the Gnome terminal. Also use the ‘-q’ option if you are restarting remotely or from a slow terminal (or redirect the output to a file as in shorewall restart > /dev/null). Upgrade your hardware. Many people find that even a modest increase in CPU and memory speed (e.g. from P3 with SDRAM to P4 with DDR) helps dramatically. EM64T-capable CPUs (from either AMD or Intel) exhibit quite acceptable restart speeds, even with a fairly complex ruleset. Shorewall also supports a fast start capability.
