Sophos XG Home (free version) to upgrade to faster VM

Hi,

the home edition can handle  gigabit connections. You have assigned and locked/committed 4 realtors,6gb of ram and using INTEL or similar NICs? The current version of XG only assigned one per download. You need to disable CPU idle so that the cores are running reasonable fast. If you wish to see high throughput try running a couple of downloads on your existing configuration while reviewing the CPU load of the XG. A single download will not cause a CPU to ramp up if the minimum speed is set to low hence the poor throughput you are experiencing.

Upgrading to a licence copy (commercial) will not gain you any performance improvements to do that you need to tune the VM and the XG IPS etc.

Ian

Hi,

the home edition can handle  gigabit connections. You have assigned and locked/committed 4 realtors,6gb of ram and using INTEL or similar NICs? The current version of XG only assigned one per download. You need to disable CPU idle so that the cores are running reasonable fast. If you wish to see high throughput try running a couple of downloads on your existing configuration while reviewing the CPU load of the XG. A single download will not cause a CPU to ramp up if the minimum speed is set to low hence the poor throughput you are experiencing.

Upgrading to a licence copy (commercial) will not gain you any performance improvements to do that you need to tune the VM and the XG IPS etc.

Ian

You have assigned and locked/committed 4 realtors,6gb of ram and using INTEL or similar NICs?

I am running ESX 7.0 on a with a  8 CPUs x Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9700 CPU @ 3.00GHz

What is a "realtor" do you mean CPU?  If so I have them set as follows

The current version of XG only assigned one per download.

What do you mean only one assigned per download? This does not make any sense.

You need to disable CPU idle so that the cores are running reasonable fast.

In VMWare I have set the power savings to High performance under ESX Host > Manage Hardware >Active Policy > High performance

Is there a setting under Sophos I should check?

John

Hi,

I hate spellcheckers. It should have been 4 real cores. Snort manages the download and only one core is assigned per download, but multiple downloads can work through one core if it is not going flat out. The current version of snort is single threaded.

ian

No worrie...

I hate spellcheckers too. 

Snort manages the download and only one core is assigned per download, but multiple downloads can work through one core if it is not going flat out. The current version of snort is single threaded.

Is there a way in sophos to set the threads or the snort to use more than 1 core?

John

You can set the number of snort processes, but that does not change the single threaded activity, one process per core.

ian

So from CLI how would I find what sophos sees as number of CPU's ?

Top is the quick answer, you need to check the option, then are a number of commands to show other stuff.

atthe top of the forums there is a cli kba.

ian

I found it from Top hit 1 and it shows 4 cores. So what is next?

There is another command about setting snort processes that I couldn’t find in that guide. Looking through my notes.

ian

Hi,

this is an old thread from the UTM forum, but the information is still relevant to the XG. William did very extensive investigation and reporting on this and similar items.

The thread should give a lot of information  and background.

snort config

Finally were are hoping that Sophos will upgrade snort to v3.x which will multi-thread in the not distant future.

Ian

And Wireguard VPN connectivity as client and server...  Like pfsense untangle and the like.

Cheers!

John