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1 No Drop Rate and RFC-2544 Tests
Routers have
traditionally been tested using RFC 2544 or similar types of performance tests.
RFC 2544 requires tests to be run at a no drop rate (NDR). This testing is done
by using a fixed packet size, usually 64-byte packets, and the results are
usually published as a metric in kilopackets per second (kpps). The tests are
designed to show the CPU power and processing power of the platform (Table 1).
Another popular
technique for providing router performance information is also an NDR test, but
it is performed with maximum packet size and presented as a throughput test.
Results are delivered as megabits per second (Mbps).
This test yields
a maximum data-rate forwarding of specific features.
For NDR tests
sometimes the platforms can process and forward packets faster than the
aggregate bandwidth of the interfaces that the specific models can support. In
this situation, all available interfaces are driven to line rate and CPU usage
recorded.
What these tests
do not provide is any indication of how the router will perform in a production
environment. They assume that router CPUs scale linearly to the point where
they drop packets. The tests provide no means for analyzing router services,
software-based algorithms, or other features. There is no ability to account
for real protocols, application layer gateways (ALGs), or other real-world
traffic.
Also, production
networks tend to have varied packet sizes. Voice traffic and TCP
acknowledgements (ACKs) tend to be very small packets, generally 64 to 80
bytes. File transfers and some applications tend to use as large a packet size
as they can negotiate. Thus, NDR tests with fixed packet sizes do not provide a
very realistic look at router performance in a production environment.
2 Firewall testing
Firewall testing
is much more complicated than any other test discussed in this document.
Zone-based firewall (ZBF) is a stateful application, maintaining and monitoring
the state of all TCP connections through it. It has multiple ALGs that allow it
to inspect and monitor specific protocols and applications. ZBF also inspects
traffic both within and between zones.
Thus, test
methodology significantly affects performance. Testing different applications
invokes specific ALGs, each of which may affect test results differently. Many
test tools can generate packets with TCP headers, but never complete the
handshake and establish state for monitoring. In some situations, the firewall
may see this situation as a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, because it would
rarely be encountered in a production network unless under attack. The use of
pure User Datagram Protocol (UDP) or other stateless traffic patterns can also
produce varying results.
For the purposes
of this document, firewall is configured with two zones, and all traffic is
sent between zones. The traffic generated is stateless and uses the same UDP
port number. Performance is measured in maximum throughput and the number of
maximum concurrent sessions. One element that influences the maximum-sessions
metric is the
amount of
installed memory in the platforms. These tests used default memory. Table 4
gives firewall performance information by platform.
Again, the data
presented in this section is for maximum performance and is not very valuable
for use in a production network. Although a router may be able to forward more
than 1 Gbps of encrypted traffic in a lab-based performance test, it should not
be expected to perform at that level in a customer’s network. Packet sizes will
vary in a real
network, and routers
cannot be stressed to NDR.
Maximum tunnels
are a specific point where performance derived in a lab situation varies from a
production design.
Although this
number is easy to reproduce in a test environment, very little traffic will be
forwarded over those tunnels during the test.
Firewall
performance will vary depending on the nature of the traffic. Because ZBF
monitors the state of traffic and monitors specific protocols and applications,
actual application traffic will affect the throughput of the firewall.
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