PIX 525 performance issue.

[gsatchivi]

I have 2 PIX 525 unrestricted bundle. Everytime I type wr mem in the pix it slows down tremendously. I have a continuous ping going from a device on the directly connected internal network. As soon as I do wr mem the ping round trip goes from under 10 ms to 806 ms. i understand that perhaps wr m consumes lot of mem resources on the device. But what is bad is that 3 minutes after this event my round trip time climbs to between 100 and 300 ms and stays there. This in return is killing traffic going to the internet and on any other interface on the firewall.

Thanks

[Philip D'Ath]

I haven't seen this behaviour in a PIX before.

My initial thoughts are that perhaps the "write mem" is causing some other problem to become more prominant.

Are the duplex settings the same on both ends of the Ethernet link? Perhaps one end is half duplex, and one is full duplex, and collissions start occuring on one end when a "write mem" is done.

Another thought. Does it perhaps only affect ICMP traffic. Try downloading a file via FTP or HTTP, and see it the download actually takes longer.

[gsatchivi]

Thanks for the reply.

The duplex setting is consistent at both ends of the links. It was not just ICMP traffic that was affected, all user traffic suffered tremendously. But the problem was not with wr m. I checked my connection table and I could not get to the end of it. I found some dns server that was generating an insane amount of traffic to other dns servers. As soon as the problem was corrected everything started to work fine. By the way, when the configuration file is too big, wr mem consumes lot of memory. That is why the ping time goes up during the moment when the command is being executed. In my case, ping time went through the roof because the PIX was under heavy load already.

Thanks

[tmehok]

How many connections? I am having some performance issues and I also have a crazy DNS server thing going on.