I need to upgrade the version of a redundant pair of 3400s running LTM only with version 9.4.1. I opened up a case a few months ago because of a recurring issue and they told me to update the boxes to at least v9.4.8.355. I have some newer boxes (3600s)running 10.0 and 10.1. I'm thinking of upgrading the 3400s to v10.1, but I can't find any document or benchmark that indicates if the performance of the older boxes running the new releases. Is there any table or document that indicates if running v10.1 will have a negative impact on performance on older hardware?

Hi Wlopez, Based on personel experience, I have upgraded several 3400s on v10.1 and they are working just fine. Performance has been relatively the same and I have seen better memory management - but other than that - the 3400 (in what I have seen) isn't working harder then when it was in v9.x branch. I hope this helps Bhattman

On my 6400's I THINK (Subjectively) it's working slightly better on 10.1 than on 9.4.8 (But they're not 100% the same load). H

Thanks for the replies. I'll probably be doing the upgrade in May. I have two 6400s in the lab which I'll use to try to debug any possible issues during the upgrade process. I just wanted to get an idea of any possible performance impact I should expect after the upgrade.

I have had pretty good luck with 10.1 on our 3400's.

Depends on the kind of stuff that you are running and also how you choose to upgrade..also make sure that irules etc are compatible.. we tested a 10.1 and 9.4.8 ( format = partion ) and redid it with just 10.1 ( format = volumes). Didnt see a big difference. Would definitely suggest increasing the max clients option to 20 if you use GUI a lot for config. One of the advantages of 10.1 is memory management..definitely looks better..

3400 ltm performance on v10.1

13 Replies

The_Bhattman
Nimbostratus
Mar 05, 2010
Hi Wlopez,

Based on personel experience, I have upgraded several 3400s on v10.1 and they are working just fine. Performance has been relatively the same and I have seen better memory management - but other than that - the 3400 (in what I have seen) isn't working harder then when it was in v9.x branch.

I hope this helps

Bhattman
Hamish
Cirrocumulus
Mar 11, 2010

On my 6400's I THINK (Subjectively) it's working slightly better on 10.1 than on 9.4.8 (But they're not 100% the same load).

H
wlopez
Cirrocumulus
Mar 26, 2010
Thanks for the replies. I'll probably be doing the upgrade in May. I have two 6400s in the lab which I'll use to try to debug any possible issues during the upgrade process. I just wanted to get an idea of any possible performance impact I should expect after the upgrade.
Nick_T_68319
Nimbostratus
Apr 15, 2010
I have had pretty good luck with 10.1 on our 3400's.
Haarith_Devaraj
Nimbostratus
Apr 22, 2010
Depends on the kind of stuff that you are running and also how you choose to upgrade..also make sure that irules etc are compatible..

we tested a 10.1 and 9.4.8 ( format = partion ) and redid it with just 10.1 ( format = volumes). Didnt see a big difference.

Would definitely suggest increasing the max clients option to 20 if you use GUI a lot for config.

One of the advantages of 10.1 is memory management..definitely looks better..
Haarith_Devaraj
Nimbostratus
Apr 22, 2010
that said..we havent pushed hard traffic on the 3400..its all on 36 or the 39's..

Also if you did a memory partition on the host for > 50% of the total memory.. 10.1 seems to struggle..Its a whole lot better if you keep the extramb provision to 0..maybe they improved how it allocates resources between host and tmm...
DeVon_Jarvis
Altostratus
Apr 26, 2010
We have several pairs of 3400's running that latest 10.1.0 version. When we upgraded from 9.x, we did notice the CPU stats went from about 15% to 30% used, but that was the only change. Seems to go up a little when we have load, but the box seems to run as well as it did on 9.x. Our units have 2GB ram.

DeVon
Jim_106285
Nimbostratus
Jun 08, 2010
Any more feedback regarding upgrading from 9.4.x to 10.1 (or 10.2) would be much appreciated.
DeVon_Jarvis
Altostratus
Jun 09, 2010
So, this last weekend we converted our 3400's from 10.1.0 to 10.2.0. One of the things F5 did was to tune the code. We have seen (from the performance tab in the GUI console) a 7-10 percent drop in CPU utilization, which gets back about half of the extra CPU consumed by upgrading to 10.x.

DeVon
hoolio
Cirrostratus
Jun 11, 2010
You might also check tmstat output. I've noticed that top and the perf graphs will show higher values than tmstat does for TMM CPU utilization. I am guessing tmstat is more accurate and at least a portion of the higher CPU usage is due to a reporting discrepancy between TMM and Linux.

Aaron