FortiGate 100E CPU Usage maxes out when downloading

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
April 4, 2018
2 replies
11807 views

Hi,

We have been using a FortiGate 100E for about 6 months or so without incident. We have a 1GB pipe out to the net and have around 60 users here. We are on firmware v5.4.5, build 6225 (GA).

Recently we have noticed that CPU Usage starts to max out if anyone does even a moderate download. My ISP manages the firewall as I am not a firewall expert. They have contacted Fortinet and at their request sent over usage logs a few times, but without a solution being offered. My ISP have made a lot of changes and done a great job to reduce the scanning footprint which seems to cause this, and this has made things run much, much better. However we can still get a bad peak, albeit smaller. I myself downloaded a 2GB file from a reputable website (Veritas), in about 8 mins, and the CPU Usage peaked at about 60%. While this was nowhere as bad, why should it go so high when the device is capable of handling thousands of connections? It seems the scanning is quite aggressive, or way too many resources are being allocated to it.

And of course I am concerned if just a few users started a large download. I have seen it go up when someone starts up their email and downloads a few hundred meg, all very legit stuff. Very perplexing. Anyone have any idea as what could be going on here?

Many thanks.

romanr

New Member

Hi,

first of all, you run the shipment firmware, which is somehow out of the normal support tree and you should really consider upgrading your box to 5.4.8.

If you want to reach speed in the area of ~1GBit with a 100E -> you should consider running the firewall in flow mode - or at least use flow mode profiles on your high speed/volume policies.

Br,

Roman