Compaq ProLiant 1000 Performance Analysis and Tuning of Raptor's Eagle NT 3.06 - Page 10

278A/0497 WHITE PAPER (cont.) ... Screen 3: Authorization Rules Alert Thresholds track the number of times a particular client has connected through the firewall in a given time period. For the purposes of benchmark testing, this feature was disabled so that it would not skew transaction times. HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE TUNING CHARACTERISTICS In order to determine the affect in performance of the firewall system, software and hardware changes were evaluated and compared to a base system. Only one software/hardware configuration change at a time was made from the base system to determine the affect it may have. Since only one change is ever made to the base system for every benchmark run, decisions can be made to change firewall configurations in order to increase performance. It also allows those decisions to be made based on sets of individual configuration changes, since multiple individual changes can lead to higher performance than one individual change. This section discusses hardware and software characteristics used in the benchmark tests. It also describes in detail, how to make the configuration changes in hardware and software so it can be referenced at a later time. Hardware Characteristics The various hardware options used in the tests are described below. Each hardware configuration change made was re-configured using the Compaq system partition utilities found by pressing the F10 key during the system bootup process. Processor Processor Pentium Pro Uni and Dual, Pentium Pro Pentium Pentium MHz 200, 512KB cache 200, 256KB cache 133 120 10