
Originally Posted by
ShadowPeak.com
A 5900 has eight physical cores that will increase to 16 logical cores when SMT is enabled.
Without SMT, there will be two cores assigned to SND/IRQ functions and six Firewall Worker cores. The SND/IRQ cores handle fully-accelerated traffic in the SXL path, emptying interface ring buffers, and keeping the six firewall worker cores load-balanced if the Dynamic Dispatcher is enabled. The Firewall Workers handle non-accelerated PXL/F2F traffic. Since you are using R77.30 I'd strongly advise enabling the Dynamic Dispatcher which is about as close to a no-brainer as it gets, assuming you have the latest GA jumbo hotfix loaded for R77.30.
If you have LAN-speed traffic traversing the firewall, which types of cores to increase will highly depend on whether the traffic is accelerated or not (SXL path). Enabling SMT tends to help the most when the majority of the traffic is handled in PXL or F2F (use fwaccel stats -s to check this). Bottom line is I'd go with the default 2/6 split w/ no SMT and see what happens.
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