Wingate Proxy performance issue

[R4ph]

Hi,

We have tested Wingate in a control environment of less than 100 user and were satisfied with the performance and result.

So Wingate Pro with unlimited users+Kaspersky+Puresight license was purchased, installed and launched to production.
Issue arises once users of more than 500 starts using it.

Internet performance was badly degraded. always time out and some even experiencing connectivity issue.

I even set a minimum restriction to users to ensure less work on server but it only works for a while. connection becomes slow again after some time.

Is there any way to troubleshoot this issue and identify the root cause.
For note, Installation was done in a brand new Dell Server, Windows 2012 R2 with 32GB RAM.

This also raise a question. Is there any limit for Wingate proxy to work without issue?

TQ.

[adrien]

Hi

there are several places to look for tracking down performance issues.

1. WinGate Network driver.

Firstly, if you're not using NAT, or WinGate's firewalling or VPN features, we recommend not installing the network driver. If you do need the driver, then we're finding on 2k12 that the number of buffers needs to be increased from the default. In the WinGate program folder there is an app called WGOptions.exe, if you run that, on the first tab there's a setting "Max network buffers". I'd set this to 8192 and reboot the server.

2. Timeline.

With a lot of users, and when you are using the timeline feature, and more specifically logging web activity to timeline (default) the timeline database can become a bottleneck. The default database (SQLite) starts having performance issues over about 200,000 records. Also WinGate Management can incur more severe load when trying to display many records, and can load the WInGAte service up as well trying to fetch them. Many people disable the timeline feature, or we recommend either

a) disable recording of Web Activity to timeline if you don't need it
b) limit the size of the database by using the purging settings or limit the number of records
c) improve the database performance by choosing another DBMS to store the data (we've tested MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL)

3. I/O subsystem (esp logging).

Especially when logging to a remote drive (which is also often the case if WinGate is in a VM loaded on a SAN), you need to make sure that output buffering is turned on in the logging settings on all the loggers in WinGate.

4. Caching

if the cache volume becomes full, it may purge every 10 minutes. The default volume size of 1GB is probably too small for your environment, I'd suggest increasing it to at least 10GB.

5. Antivirus scanning.

Kaspersky AV does put a significant load on the system. We normally recommend excluding certain mime types from scanning. For example if you set a list of types not to scan, you could add

audio/*
image/*
video/*

If none of these significantly improves things, let us know and we can look remotely at your system. WinGate on a modern server like that should be able to handle 500 users no problem.

Regards

Adrien

[R4ph]

Hi Adrien,

Cheers for the advice.
I have followed every steps and so far Wingate is working as it should.
Performance wise, it is better than our previous proxy !!

Thank You. :)

R4ph.

[adrien]

Hi

thanks for letting us know

Regards

Adrien