Hi David, I am interested in the findings of minimal impact on large packet firewall throughput when enabling intrusion inspection, SSL decryption, and other functions. This seems to be different than what we have seen on Cisco provided performance testing and real-world experience.

Throughput has typically gone down significantly. The 4110 for example starts at 20 Gbps firewall throughput; is reduced to a Cisco estimated 2.8 Gbps with AVC + IPS + URL with 450 byte packets.

With tests showing that the performance can drop by up to 80% with SSL/TLS decryption.

Also, enabling File Identification leads to a performance degradation of around 22%, enabling cloud
malware lookup and blocking results in a degradation of around 40% and enabling File Sandboxing leads to a total
degradation of around 50%.

Thank you, Jason