Any questions? Post'em

Good question. It sounds like you're a BIG-IP pro, so you know that BIG-IP has a lot of options. :) By my count there are over 2000 configurable options, and like any device, changing options can affect performance.

 

 

The good news is we can change the vast majority of the knobs and dials and the impact is barely measurable, sometimes higher, sometimes lower, but generally small enough to fit inside a margin of error.

 

 

For the few knobs that can have an impact, we usually have some idea of "how much" the impact can be. On the BIG-IP 8800 the performance for "full" and "partial" PVA acceleration is typically within 1% of being identical, due to the processing power of the BIG-IP 8800. The real change switching from "full" to "partial" is that CPU usage goes from 0% (i.e. handled entirely within PVA) to probably 30-40% for small responses, less than 20% for 8KB, and less than 5% for 64KB and larger.

 

 

Generically speaking, for configurations that have "no" acceleration (software only), top-end performance is likely to be reduced by 5-35%, depending on response size. As an interesting data point, even assuming a worst-case-scenario the L4 performance of the BIG-IP 8800 is still a healthy margin above the competition. :)

 

 

As always, I personally suggest that customers run their own performance tests to be sure all environmental factors are properly considered. For example, it's often not well appreciated how much server performance factors in. Similarly, many customers don't have a good idea of their response size mix, etc -- there are hundreds of factors like this. The only way to be sure everything is factored in is to test in your particular environment. Having said that, the relative performance between vendors should be similar to what you see in the report.

 

 

I hope this helps!

 

 

Mike Lowell

 

 

p.s.

 

I'll provide your feedback to the right people to look new documents in the future. Thanks!