High Latency / Sluggish Firewall during elephant flows

[phlrnnr]

If you have been dealing with high latency and sluggish performance of your Checkpoint firewalls when running R80.30 or R80.40 on the 3.10 kernel, you need to read sk170560 which was just released on 11/18.  This issue seems to happen when elephant flows cause a couple CPUs to spike, but causes IO impact to all cores.

We have been fighting elephant flows on R80.40 with fast_accel rules, but the dynamic nature of the Internet makes that difficult.  We are hoping this kernel parameter change will help us greatly.

I hope this post can help someone else who may be struggling with this issue.

[PhoneBoy]

I believe we have a customer release that may help here (specifically around improving Elephant Flow situations).
Check with your local Check Point office.