SMTP Question

[DeShark]

I work an an ISP. We are seeing an issue where people cannot check their mail (pop or smtp) on any mail server when we have a high volume of smtp traffic flowing. Is there some sort of optimization that needs to be done on the firewall to help with this? We are running NGX R60 HFA02 on SPLAT. SmartDefense is not enabled on the mail features. Concurrent connections around 80k seems to be the threashold. We seem to run fine under 70k. Thanks in advance for any assistance.

DeShark

[MarioL]

You might need to increase the state table. Edit your firewall object and go to "Capacity Optimization" tab. Tweak the Maximum Connections as needed... and remember to have plenty of RAM.

[DeShark]

That is and has been at 250k. We are running with 512MB of RAM. Do you think memory is the issue?

DeShark

[chillyjim]

Yes, this does sound like a memory problem. Up the memory to a least a gig and you should see much better performance.

What platform and version are you running?

[DeShark]

Running NGX R60 on SPLAT. Thanks.. I'll bump it to a gig and see how that helps. Optimally what amount of memory would be best?

DeShark

[chillyjim]

You should be able to get in the neighborhood of 150K sessions without problems with a gig of RAM. You do have to adjust the number of connections allowed in firewall object as MarioL pointed out.

[MarioL]

If you work for an ISP I'd try and get 2GB in, you never know when you are going to have DDoS or spikes or whatever and more memory helps Check Point quite a lot.

[chillyjim]

Are you using the SMTP security server or trying to run the anti-virus on it?

I didn't think of asking before, because I'd be really surprised if you got 10K sessions but...

[DeShark]

I added a gig to the box bringing it up to 1.5 GB. No difference. The memory utilization is the same. The new gig is available. We are still seeing the intermittent issue where people cannot pop or send email on occasion. No we are not using the SMTP security server. We have no problem with the number of concurrent connections when it gets high.. 85k is seen on occasion on the high side. Config is set to 250k. Just this issue where people cannot pop or smtp to ANY mail server on our network. Very odd and very critical! Any ideas?

DeShark