PA-500 and memory upgrade

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PA-500 and memory upgrade

L4 Transporter

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

16 REPLIES 16

Not applicable

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

"show system resources" if I remember correctly.

L4 Transporter

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

L3 Networker

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

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

Bob

Can this be done to the 2000 series as well ?

Not applicable

Sadly no, it is only available for PA500 Smiley Sad

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

Unfortunately not according to Smiley Sad

Edit: Read the comments regarding 2000-series.

L4 Transporter

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

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 

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

L4 Transporter

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%.

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

L1 Bithead

Hi,

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

Best Regard.

Vincent.

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

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