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The question is 'will a software firewall running on an home PC affect network bandwidth".
The answer is 'no' ,thats all there is too it, if the software firewall is causing slowdowns in bandwidth, either the PC is archaic or there is something wrong with the hardware or software.
You will have exactly the same amount of bandwidth firewall or otherwise theres no new traffic generated.
The bus speed of an enterprise class PIX firewall IIRC is 66mhz, say for arguments sake the 535 , 1 gigabit per second of throughput..
Typically a custom designed hardware dedicated to move extremely large amounts of data will mostly likely be faster, but not always, and it doesnt match a modern PC , since it doesn't usually need too.
Again network speeds are tiny compared to CPU bus and memory speeds, the bottleneck on a system less than 8 years old (maybe more) is going to be the ethernet pipe, not many home users run gigabit ethernet, and even then a modern PC is quite capable of running a 1G ethernet card.
Most network cards don't even run close to capacity.
A PCI-X 1066 bus can transfer data at 8.5 gigaBYTES per second.
Whats an OC48 run at 2.4 giga bits per second ?
Not even in the same league.
The bottleneck will be the dsl or cable modem, the network card will always be starved, and the cpu will be at grade 1 famine.
I can't see why on earth anyone would think otherwise, granted in a multiple OC48 with hundreds of ports then the data transfers get hairy, but this is all about a home user running a software firewall on a PC..
re the link, thanks mr mephisto i'll edit it.
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