What are the critical resources in a firewall?
It’s important to understand the critical resources of your firewall architecture, so when you do capacity planning, performance optimizations, etc., you know exactly what you need to do, and how much you need to do it in order to get the desired result. What exactly the firewall’s critical resources are tends to vary from site to site, depending on the sort of traffic that loads the system. Some people think they’ll automatically be able to increase the data throughput of their firewall by putting in a box with a faster CPU, or another CPU, when this isn’t necessarily the case. Potentially, this could be a large waste of money that doesn’t do anything to solve the problem at hand or provide the expected scalability. On busy systems, memory is extremely important. You have to have enough RAM to support every instance of every program necessary to service the load placed on that machine. Otherwise, the swapping will start and the productivity will stop. Light swapping isn’t usually much
