USFW Thread Blocker Details?

Timothy_Hall — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 19:38:51 GMT

So like most of my painfully specific questions this will probably need to be answered by R&D. Tagging @PhoneBoy

I'm doing my monthly updates to my Gateway Performance Optimization Course, and I'm curious about the role of the "Thread Blocker" and under what circumstances it might need to be disabled. As I understand so far it is some kind of watchdog to ensure that a USFW-based fwk worker instance does not monopolize its CPU while handling a long-running thread by basically blocking that hogging thread, and giving some other ones a fair chance at that CPU. This feature seems to be trying to avoid a kernel "soft lockup" type situation that could occur when the worker instances were still located in the kernel, and did not relinquish the CPU in a timely fashion. However some other things I've read are that it is purely "monitoring only" and does not actively do anything other than create logs. This SK does provide some insight but I'm specifically curious about what kinds of situations/workloads (elephant flows?) would not play well with this feature that is enabled by default:

sk180437: Unexpected traffic latency or outage on a Security Gateway / Cluster after policy installation

Also @Thomas_Eichelbu posted some interesting speculation & questions about the Thread Blocker in a prior thread that don't appear to have been answered:

https://community.checkpoint.com/t5/Product-Announcements/R81-10-Jumbo-Hotfix-Accumulator-New-Recommended-Take-94-formerly/bc-p/178897/highlight/true#M1517

Thanks!

Re: USFW Thread Blocker Details?

NarebaBR — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 17:49:22 GMT

Nice man.

Did you discover anything else related to thread blocker, actually?

Re: USFW Thread Blocker Details?

Timothy_Hall — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 20:53:04 GMT

Not yet, will need some info from R&D.

topic Re: USFW Thread Blocker Details? in Firewall and Security Management

USFW Thread Blocker Details?

Re: USFW Thread Blocker Details?

Re: USFW Thread Blocker Details?