Smoothwall help

wannabedamned · 13 Jan 2008 at 12:03

I've just started a new Job and the current technician has Smoothwall in place.

Now I don't know what he's done, But it takes a good 10 seconds to load a page that's going through the Smoothwall proxy computer.

If we disable filtering, The speed goes back to lightening quick.

Now it has me confused because it's not like it's blocking the pages that take a while to load, It just slows them down.

It's acting like a Slow DNS problem, But our DNS server is fine, If we connect directly to it, Things are lightening quick again.

Any ideas?

swinnie · 13 Jan 2008 at 13:03

We had smoothwall where I am and it was with a citrix thin client system and it was always slow.

I have recently tried using Untangle which is a free and open source firewall, VPN and Web Blocker/Proxy and that is quite fast and is really easy to get going.

garyh · 13 Jan 2008 at 14:30

Sounds to me like he has enabled the local caching of files within Smoothwall; this slows browsing considerably as the files are essentially downloaded first to the proxy gateway, stored on disk, then passed down to the client.

Have a gander around the options for it, disable it or set the threshold much higher so it only caches the biggest files.

wannabedamned · 13 Jan 2008 at 15:37

garyh said:
Sounds to me like he has enabled the local caching of files within Smoothwall; this slows browsing considerably as the files are essentially downloaded first to the proxy gateway, stored on disk, then passed down to the client.

Have a gander around the options for it, disable it or set the threshold much higher so it only caches the biggest files.

That sounds promising, Would that effect things if filtering is turned off though, while the proxy is still being used? As things do speed up then.

I'll give it a go tomorrow

wannabedamned · 15 Jan 2008 at 13:40

I solved this problem today, and wondered if anyone had any feedback on to why my solution worked, as i'm slightly confused.

All I did was browse to Guardian > Proxy and then advanced.

Under there I deselected Log Client Hostname. And this has given us a considerable speed boost.

I am unsure though, if this has solved our problem directly, or whether by deselecting the above option, I have indirectly solved our problem. In which case, I wondered if by telling someone this information they could possibly point me to where the problem could actually be cropping up.

Thanking you.

Avalon · 15 Jan 2008 at 13:54

The smoothwall community has very good forum support, i'd strongly suggest you have a look if you have the free version in place (you don't mention if it's a business that falls into the community edition catchment eg charity etc or a paid full on business version). If it's a business version again the support is highly rated by those I know who've used it.