Question about firewall bandwidth

reginoletellis · ‎02-14-2013

Hello all;

I am not sure that this is a firewall problem at all; but we recently just upgraded from a 10 MB burstable pipe to a 50 MB burstable pipe but yet I am STILL only seeing anywhere from 4 MB-8MB on a GOOD day....BEFORE I go through all my switches; could this possibly be something in my interfaces causing this? I find it hard to believe that I could be losing almost 50 Megs across the LAN with no one else online otherwise?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated...

tobyarnett · ‎02-14-2013

A simple test is to connect a PC as close to your ISP connection without going through any other network devices. Download a large file and validate your bandwidth. Now do the same download behind each piece of network equipment till you identify the device causing the latency.

It is possible that the issue is your firewall. If you are running proxy services, antivirus, VPN, web based controls and many other services the issue may just be to reduce what your doing on your firewall. I have seen in the past where a client was running too many services on a smaller net screen few and their issue sounded a lot like yours.

Do the test above if the issue is your fw see if your running too many services for your device or post here and we can troubleshoot further.

-Toby

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-Toby

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wfldsmartin · ‎02-15-2013

This could be some bit/byte confusion. When you buy service from an ISP, the speed is measured in bits. When you do a download, the dialog in Windows shows the speeds in bytes. So a 50Mbps pipe, fully saturated, would be a 6.25MB/sec download (minus overhead). Note the capital/lowecase B/b to denote between bytes and bits.

Are you getting your measurements of 4MB to 8MB from a browser download dialog?

-Stephen

reginoletellis · ‎02-15-2013

Hello Stephen;

You make an interesting observation but I do not think this is the case here. The site that I am using represents the speeds in Mbps...the site in question is www.bandwidth.com

My most recent attempt got me 5.34 Mbps download and 2.37 Mbps upload..

Toby- I am beginnning the process of working my way through the switches to see if i have a bottlneck somewhere and I have als opened a ticket with or ISP to verify that we are enabled for what we are paying for.

Thanks to both of you guys for the input....I am very appreciative..

Reggie

reginoletellis · ‎02-15-2013

Update....it seems that someone CHANGED both our outside and inside interface settings from auto auto to full 100 at some point in the past for some unknown reason....changing them both back to auto auto instantly got me 30 Mbps down.....still only seeing about 11 Mbps UP....BUT that is a dramatic improvement over where it WAS...

tobyarnett · ‎02-15-2013

Reggie,

Normally on all your network devices I would recommend you use manual configs such as 100/full or 1000/full on both sides. It is possible that when they configured your inside and outside to 100/full that one of your other ends auto sync'd to 100/half. That duplex mismatch would have seriously reduced your bandwidth. Not sure if you have any logs to confirm this. But maybe you can try and recreate that scenario to test how your other devices sync up. It would be a good test to see if the issue was just a duplex mismatch.

-Toby

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-Toby

Please don't forget to rate any helpful post.

_____________________________________
There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder.
- Ronald Reagan