Take a look at our IPS group tests if you are interested in such performance
metrics. We go into some details regarding acceptable latencies of Gigabit
devices ("acceptable" obviously depends a lot on whether you intend to
deploy them internally or at the network perimeter).
The kind of behaviour mentioned below was observed frequently in our tests
(i.e. That latency actually gets lower as traffic levels increase....up to a
point). Round about 225,000pps is indeed around 1Gbps with a "normal"
average packet size - a lot of our "real world" tests are based around these
kinds of figures.
Edition 2 is on line - Edition 1 can now only be purchased as a PDF for
immediate download (or as a CD)
Bob Walder
The NSS Group
On 12/2/05 8:16 pm, "Massimo" <massimo.mail@quipo.it> wrote:
We did some test with stress test equipment on the capability to handle
hight traffic load with low latency on some "diffused" IPS.
I can tell you will have problem with some IPS product with that high
load of packet. There are also commercial Gigabit IDS that lose traffic
(doesn't slow, but lose) with that number of packet (225,000 packet/s
can be close to a full gigabit with real packet size).
I am sorry but I have a NDA on that test and can't give you more detail.
Best Regards,
Massimo
On 09/01/2005 14.49, Mike Frantzen wrote:
I'm planning on demanding that the IPS systems perform at >225,000
packets/second (100% of packets inspected) with <.5ms latency per
packet. Is this reasonable for an IPS?
Just be careful how you measure that .5ms latency limit. If you do a
single ping without background traffic against an IPS that does
interrupt polling then you'll see latency of about 1ms or 10ms
(depending on the underlying operating system used). That latency
will start to drop once you have over 1000pps and will gradually
converge towards zero.
I'm not sure which IPS vendors do interrupt polling to gain performance.
It wasn't worth it for us.
- What is the acceptable/standard latency per packet for an IPS?
Humans begin to notice latency at about the 200ms mark (call it 100ms to
account for the return packet). TCP behavior changes at 30-100ms unless
the stack does round trip time measurements. Online gamers get cranky
at the 80-100ms mark.
That being said, you probably won't find an IPS that introduces more than
1ms of latency.
.mike
frantzen@(nfr.com | cvs.openbsd.org | w4g.org)
PGP: CC A4 E2 E8 0C F8 42 F0 BC 26 85 5B 6F 9E ED 28
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