Just how much data is transfered during login between Nessus client and server?

[Thomas Arendsen Hein]

* Chris Buechler <cbuechler at gmail.com> [20041208 09:18]:
> On Wed, 08 Dec 2004 14:16:52 +1300, Jason Haar <jason.haar at trimble.co.nz> wrote:
> > I just ran it here - nessus client logon generated 5.3Mbytes of traffic
> > over a WAN at an average of 0.24Mbs. I also have iperf installed on the
> > Nessus server - it rated 1.2Mbs to the same workstation with Nessus
> > client... That's 5 times faster...
> 
> The box I picked wasn't the best example - I hadn't used that
> particular one in quite a while, and it was still running 2.0.x. 
> Upgraded to 2.2.0, and the plugins are now ~5.3 MB.  It can still fill
> a 1 Mb link though.  But we're talking a dual P3 1 GHz with SCSI 10K
> RPM drives.
> 
> There's a huge difference between iperf (just pumping out as much data
> as you can) and loading ~5800 Nessus plugins to the client.  For the
> latter, nessusd has to open ~5800 nasl files (if I understand how it's
> working), which can take a while, especially if you're using IDE
> drives.  If I had to guess I'd say disk I/O is your limiting factor. 
> A P4 1.6 GHz with an IDE drive wasn't a whole lot faster over gigabit
> LAN than the box with SCSI drives over 1 Mb VPN.  That's what I'm
> basing my guess on.  Both are FreeBSD 5.3 boxes.

It was very slow for me, too, when I had nessusd and its plugins on
an NFS drive. CPU and network didn't show any significant load.

Thomas

-- 
Email: thomas at intevation.de
http://intevation.de/~thomas/