Once the failover condition is met(failure is detected), the time it takes for failover should be same, manual or automatic. The time to detect the failure may be different depending on the type of the failure and your configuration if applicable in case of automatic failure. Depending on the failure that creates the failover, automatic failover might cause more packet loss. If the link failure happens on the firewall port, meaning that the port on the firewall is disconnected (not the remote port connected to switch router), I would say firewall would detect it fairly quickly. In such a case the failover should be triggered immediately, just like suspend. If your network does not tolerate potential latency during failover, we would recommend you to do a failover test to make sure what would be the exact delay in case a failover triggered by link failure will happen. The overall end-user impact may be affected by surrounding L2/L3 network design as well. But if you need to failover due to a maintenance activity we recommend to use suspend functionality. It is easier to control the failover via suspend and the failover will be initiated immediately.
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