PA-500 and memory upgrade

[BobW]

Recently I ordered and installed the memory upgrade for my PA-500.  It was under $400, is a simple end user install and upgraded the management plane to 2gb (from 1gb).

I will not give any estimates as to improvement as I do not want to exaggerate, however, I highly recommend anyone with a PA-500 spend the $400 (ish).

Hope that helps,

Bob

[BCH]

Any chance you could compare the memory swapping before and after the upgrade ? (provided you had already tested this beforehand )

"show system resources" if I remember correctly.

[BobW]

Let me just say the difference in the console is noticeable.

Unfortunately I did not take a system resource before.  Maybe you could post your stats for a comparison?

I am using 5.0.3.  After the upgrade "show system resources" is as follows.

top - 09:33:36 up 1 day, 15:03,  1 user,  load average: 0.03, 0.09, 0.14

Tasks: 102 total,   1 running, 101 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie

Cpu(s):  3.4%us,  3.2%sy,  5.9%ni, 87.0%id,  0.5%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.1%si,  0.0%st

Mem:   2028576k total,  2000836k used,    27740k free,    64768k buffers

Swap:  2212876k total,      924k used,  2211952k free,   887360k cached

Bob

[Quinton]

Does it improve on commit times? Also does it improve the speed at which reports are generated?

[BobW]

Report generator is absolutely faster, no question.  Commit times are almost certainly quicker (but I did not time them).

Bob

[gafrol]

Can this be done to the 2000 series as well ?

[BCH]

Sadly no, it is only available for PA500

@BobW I'll try to get the info on one of our appliances tomorrow for comparison.

[mikand]

Unfortunately not according to

Edit: Read the comments regarding 2000-series.

[BobW]

Anyone have the output of the show system resources of a standard PA-500?  I would like to see the difference in memory usage.

Thanks,

Bob

[licenselu]

Hello,

PA 500 with around 100 users behind it

top - 16:01:41 up 44 days,  6:37,  1 user,  load average: 1.11, 0.36, 0.19

Tasks: 100 total,   2 running,  98 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie

Cpu(s):  2.9%us,  2.0%sy,  4.3%ni, 90.1%id,  0.6%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.1%si,  0.0%st

Mem:    995872k total,   963276k used,    32596k free,     6576k buffers

Swap:  2212876k total,   477108k used,  1735768k free,   206268k cached

As I can see from your output, in your device, the swap area is not used.

Do you see any difference when you commit (time, etc) ?

Regards,

HA 

[BobW]

Unfortunately I did not do any pretesting.  Even if I did it would not have been valid as I took it to 5.0.3 at the same time.

It is my opinion that everything is quicker including the commit process.  Fro $400 (ish) I would suggest you give it a shot.  Best money I have spent in a while!

Bob

[scantwell]

Normally, from CLI, when you commit you see dots that show you the progress.

………………..55%.............75%.........90% etc

Here are the times.

	Student5	Student10
55%	1:17	:56
70%	1:31	1:06
98%	1:47	1:23
Complete	2:03	1:40

Based on these times, I would say that there is faster commit times, we saved closed to 25% of the commit time (~30 secs)

Student5 Swap:  2212876k total,   303200k used,  1909676k free,   129612k cached

Student10 Swap:  2008084k total, 0k used,  2008084k free,  1143148k cached

Then, from CLI mode, I loaded a script, which essentially loads a configuration and does the commit automatically.

Here are the times.

	Student5	Student19
55%	1:26	1.15
70%	1:41	1:28
98%	1:50	1:39
Complete	2:06	1:42

We are consistently seeing an increase of load capability and commit response times of 25%.

[panos]

%25 is very nice result.Thanks for test results.

[vchanal]

Hi,

Do you know if its possible to upgrade one member of a HA pair only?

Best Regard.

Vincent.

[scantwell]

I do not see any problems with upgrading a single FW only.  It should not break the HA functionality.