For more information regarding the security incident at F5, the actions we are taking to address it, and our ongoing efforts to protect our customers, click here.

Forum Discussion

mnb_63148's avatar
mnb_63148
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
May 13, 2014

Does clone pooling affect performance?

We have been asked by our security team to enable X-forwarded-for as a default for the HTTP profile as well as enable clone pooling for all urls on the LTMs.   Are there any performance issues ...
Kevin_Stewart's avatar
Kevin_Stewart
Icon for Employee rankEmployee
May 13, 2014

Are there any performance issues that I should be concerned about regarding clone pooling? Does it cause an increased demand on system resources? Are you aware of any issues that could occur with customer traffic as a result of enabling clone pooling?

 

Haven't done an immense amount of performance testing with clone pools enabled, but considering that it's basically like a port mirror, there should be negligible performance impact. Understand of course that because it's mirroring traffic at such a low level in the stack, if your incoming and/or outgoing data is encrypted (ie. https), then your cloned traffic will also be encrypted.

 

We have enabled x-forwarded-for in the past for specific urls. We are now asked to enable it for all urls? Are you aware of any issues caused by enabling x-forwarded-for?

 

It's basically just a header insert, so the only performance consideration I can think of is the additional few bytes of header information placed on the wire. How any given application may handle that header is completely independent of proxy performance.