PA-2050 commit frustration

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PA-2050 commit frustration

L3 Networker

Hello,

We have 2x PA-2050 devices in HA running 3.1.10 and I'm frustrating about commit time, it takes like 5-10 min.

Can I expect significant improvement, commit time speaking, with upgrade to 4.1.5 ?

Field experiences in commit time with 4.1.5 ?

Or should I think about  PA-4000 platform ?

10 REPLIES 10

L1 Bithead

Im sure any update above 4.0.9 should improve this a lot. Give a try with 4.1.4 or 4.1.5. I should use the 4.1.4

Best regards

Palo Alto Networks Guru

My suggestion is not upgrade because of commit performance.  You should upgrade for a feature needed in your network or a bug fix that could not be back ported to 3.1.  On the performance of commit, it depends on your configuration.  In many cases the commit time will go down when upgrading to 4.1, but it may not change the commit time at all.  I hope this helps.

L1 Bithead

We are a new Palo Alto customer, and although so far I'm liking the PA-500 HA cluster I'm setting up a great deal (after two evaluations of Palo Altos in the last few years), the extremely long commit times are one of my biggest issues with these firewalls.  They take so long that I have gotten in the habbit of working on something else during the commit.  This may be acceptable for this cluster, which is only for our PC Internet access and VPN gateway, but this may be a sticking point for us in considering Palo Altos for the lease replacement of our HA firewall cluster that's protecting our online application (which will have a far more complicated configuration).  I would like to think that this is a high priority for Palo Alto Networks to get resolved in future releases (we are on 4.1.4 right now, and these firewalls are not yet in production).

Thank's .. since the upgrade seams not solve the commit problem, what are the configuration optimizations that can, considerably, help this issue ?

How can I find why my commits take 5-10 min !!

slow commit is only on 2050 and low hw platform or even with 4000-5000 hw platform ?

Some things that will increase your commit times are high logging rates, high log forwarding to panorama, sysloging all logs, large number of rules, large number of objects.  If you can reduce your logging by being more selective on exactly what you need to log, reduce the nubmer of rules and focusing on application based rules, reducing the number of objects, and reducing your log forwarding will all help reduce your commit time.  I hope this helps,

   ~Jamie

L1 Bithead

Another factor that can potentially cause long commits is performing User-ID with a sizable Active Directory structure that contains thousands of User Groups.  In 3.1 and 4.0 the user & group discovery is performed by the User-ID agent and the Filter Group Members setting on the agent can be used to reduce the number of user groups sent to the firewall.  In 4.1 and later user & group discovery is performed by the firewall itself; the corresponding function is called Group Include List (located under Group Mapping Settings) and will need to be configured on the firewall.  By only sending the groups that are actually referenced in policies on the firewall commit times can be improved, especially with very large AD environments.

L4 Transporter

Hello,

Can you log on SSH, run command "show system resources" and paste here the output ?

top - 07:37:10 up 16:30,  1 user,  load average: 1.20, 1.38, 0.99
Tasks:  84 total,   1 running,  83 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  6.2%us,  8.4%sy,  0.0%ni, 81.1%id,  1.0%wa,  0.2%hi,  3.1%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   1007852k total,   995864k used,    11988k free,    18224k buffers
Swap:  2008084k total,   411636k used,  1596448k free,   595788k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
2610 root      20   0  384m  79m 5116 S   17  8.1  72:45.62 mgmtsrvr
2625 root      20   0  131m  63m  38m S   13  6.5  31:33.52 logrcvr
2096 root      15  -5 21680 3312 2632 S    2  0.3  24:53.92 sysd
2609 root      20   0  379m 188m  41m S    2 19.1  11:43.50 devsrvr
25219 helenio   20   0  4528 1032  840 R    1  0.1   6:33.33 top
2595 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:29.46 kjournald
31551 helenio   20   0 22344 1128  928 S    0  0.1   0:29.93 sshd
    1 root      20   0  1832  560  532 S    0  0.1   0:02.15 init
    2 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.01 kthreadd
    3 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.20 migration/0
    4 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.01 ksoftirqd/0
    5 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.06 migration/1
    6 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.09 ksoftirqd/1
    7 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.02 events/0
    8 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.87 events/1
    9 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.02 khelper
   57 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:06.22 kblockd/0
   58 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.54 kblockd/1
   61 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kseriod
   65 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 ata/0
   66 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 ata/1
   67 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 ata_aux
   73 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 khubd
   98 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   2:32.30 kswapd0
   99 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 aio/0
  100 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 aio/1
  101 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 nfsiod
  671 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 scsi_eh_0
  673 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 scsi_eh_1
  692 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.36 mtdblockd
  708 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 rpciod/0
  709 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 rpciod/1
  741 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:04.64 kjournald
  794 root      16  -4  2004  384  380 S    0  0.0   0:00.80 udevd
1619 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:06.52 kjournald
1620 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kjournald
1895 root      20   0  2004  632  588 S    0  0.1   0:00.10 syslogd
1898 root      20   0  1888  332  328 S    0  0.0   0:00.01 klogd
1906 rpc       20   0  2080  496  492 S    0  0.0   0:00.01 portmap
1924 root      20   0  2112  668  664 S    0  0.1   0:00.06 rpc.statd
1974 root      20   0  6700  612  608 S    0  0.1   0:00.02 sshd
2003 root      20   0  6700  592  588 S    0  0.1   0:00.00 sshd
2012 root      20   0  3276  624  620 S    0  0.1   0:00.02 xinetd
2035 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 lockd
2036 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:05.05 nfsd
2037 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:04.40 nfsd
2038 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:03.14 nfsd
2039 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:06.24 nfsd
2040 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:03.43 nfsd
2041 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:02.86 nfsd
2042 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:05.15 nfsd
2043 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:06.76 nfsd
2046 root      20   0  2356  668  576 S    0  0.1   0:00.11 rpc.mountd
2078 root       0 -20 53616 6204 3300 S    0  0.6   0:50.09 masterd_core

Hi,

The commit generally depends how big  your configuration is. I would not feel comfortable asking you to upgrade if you have no issues on 3.1.10.

Looking at your show system resources your management server and dev server seems to be healthy too.

Thanks,

Syed Hasnain

A linux admin would not agree to say 400MB of swap is healthy.

Btw I usually get 7-12 minutes commit times on my PA-500 even when it's idling during night times. This is loooooong.

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