Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: security, firewall | Themes: The Internet, Networking, Laptops and Notebooks
- 1. The Urge to Miniaturize Networking Appliances is Pervasive
- 2. Yoggie Pico to the Rescue!
- 3. Yoggie Pico Security Components, Fit and Finish
- 4. Installing and Using the Yoggie Pico
- 5. Testing the Yoggie Pico Pro
- 6. Pico Pro Performance Results
- 7. Pico Pro Management
- 8. Yoggie Pico Pro: Conclusions and Recommendations
- 9. More on this topic
6. Pico Pro Performance Results
Two major contributing factors to degradation of desktop and notebook performance come from adware/spyware/malware infestation and corresponding protective countermeasures. Your computer must work overtime just to get through the day’s business while battling an onslaught of malicious software vying for control of your computing environment. Yoggie’s Pico security platform restores balance and order to the PC computing environment. It offloads most (but certainly not all) of the complex processing and resource-intensive tasks involved with handling potentially malicious network traffic, while enabling the PC’s processor to focus on general computing tasks. In fact, only the third-party software components included in the Pico environment (most notably, Kaspersky items) require any CPU cycles on the host PC. For the Pico itself, tighter integration between its applications and runtime platform also enable a more efficient signature and software update path than is typical for PC desktop applications and updates.
In general, starting up the Pico is quick. Most of our start-ups fell somewhere between 40 and 50 seconds after we jumped the first-time start-up hurdle. By comparison, our Windows XP notebook took over 1:30 to boot up, and our Vista desktop routinely chunked away for just under 2:00 before starting up. Except for occasional page loading delays (which we’ve seen happen when IE’s anti-phishing filter kicks into overdrive on the desktop as well), the Pico really didn’t appear to get in our way when performing various types of Internet access (email, Web surfing and FTP connections, primarily).
When using the Pico, there is no perceptible slow-down in surfing activity. Occasionally, content-heavy pages appear to pause as they are inspected for cleanliness, only to suddenly burst into view. However, our instrumentation showed no significant drop in either throughput or performance. In fact, much to our surprise, the Pico seemed to actually exhibit better network performance in some of our informal testing. Occasional initial page load delays may be unsettling for some, but we find the apparent (though negligible) performance penalty as a much welcome alternative to browsing carelessly at full-speed-and at full-risk. In the security realm, you tend to sacrifice convenience and luxury (but never liberty) to obtain additional safety, so this experience is entirely predictable.
That said, we did observe a measurable increase in network latency (from the tens to hundreds of milliseconds), a difference that is completely imperceptible to humans, matched with an unusual increase in download speeds (upload speeds appear relatively unaffected). We can only speculate, but these results suggest that some kind of packet prioritization or traffic shaping may be occurring transparently inside the Pico itself.
Table 1-1: Notebook network performance test with the Yoggie Pico Pro disabled.
| Upload | Download | Latency |
|---|---|---|
| 473 kbps | 6441 kbps | 17 ms |
| 466 kbps | 6644 kbps | 12 ms |
| 476 kbps | 6671 kbps | 14 ms |
| 433 kbps | 6557 kbps | 13 ms |
Table 1-2: Notebook network performance test with Yoggie Pico Pro enabled.
| Upload | Download | Latency |
|---|---|---|
| 493 kbps | 7937 kbps | 143 ms |
| 483 kbps | 7178 kbps | 118 ms |
| 488 kbps | 8173 kbps | 132 ms |
| 473 kbps | 7910 kbps | 123 ms |
Table 1-3: Desktop network performance test with Yoggie Pico Pro disabled.
| Upload | Download | Latency |
|---|---|---|
| 401 kbps | 6469 kbps | 40 ms |
| 418 kbps | 6558 kbps | 42 ms |
| 423 kbps | 6368 kbps | 35 ms |
| 423 kbps | 6436 kbps | 39 ms |
Table 1-4: Desktop network performance test with Yoggie Pico Pro enabled.
| Upload | Download | Latency |
|---|---|---|
| 477 kbps | 8064 kbps | 164 ms |
| 462 kbps | 7938 kbps | 158 ms |
| 473 kbps | 7782 kbps | 142 ms |
| 468 kbps | 7944 kbps | 155 ms |
Roughly half of the processing burden for most tasks (IDS, firewall, content filtration and scanning engines) occurs on the Pico Pro except for Kaspersky spyware and virus filtering, which is split between the Pico Pro and a desktop or notebook PC. Give the Pico Pro its due-that isn’t a bad thing by any means. We experienced no performance issues even when surfing inside multiple windows laden with media-rich content, other than a few initial pauses loading some of these pages; otherwise, our surfing experience wasn’t dramatically altered in any way.
- Previous page Testing the Yoggie Pico Pro
- Next page Pico Pro Management
Nice, although running an OS that's actually secure (i.e. not windows) would certainly give you most of the same benefits...
Right... because OSX, all the Linux Distros, and BSD all come out of the box preconfigured with up to date antivirus, anti-spyware, traffic shaping, intrusion detection, and content filtering.
Or wait... maybe you're just saying that those OSes are all completely secure and don't need anything else... riiiiiight.
seems like a neat device, did you do any surfing to nether regions of the internet to see what kind of infections it could actally block?
That bit published by Google that malware can install just by visting a site is rather disturbing. Downloading and running a malware program is one thing, but just clicking on a link and getting infected should be blocked by a device like this. Does the pico block such attackS?
Or do I need to maintain my clean and dirty setups. One setup is only for known good sites or offline activity and it is unplugged while the dirty setup is online. Normally the dirty setup is clean, but the anti-virus software has been eaten before.
I purchased 2 of the Pico's (from Yoggie.com) which arrived yesterday. I bought it through their website because they have a promo right now where you get a 3 year license included in the purchase price. The setup and install went just like the review states - perfectly. Not a single problem and it went very quickly (I didn't get the certificate error like the reviewer).
My laptop performance after the install is way beyond what I had expected. Before installing the Pico, opening an Excel spreadsheet from a LAN drive took over 1 minute (with Norton 360 installed). After the Pico install and uninstall of Norton, opening the same Excel document took less than 5 seconds!!! Another performance boost that I noticed was when I wake up my laptop (after about 30 min of inactivity) - it used to take a long time to fully wake up to the point where it was usable again (at lease a min or more - depending on how long it was inactive), where it is virtually instantaneous now.
I've been raving about this little device all day. So far, it ranks among my top 2 gadget purchases ever (right along side my Harmony Remote).
I highly recommend it.
I would be interested in finding out of two computers on the same switch are effected by the USB device. Sometimes I transfer documents between computers on the same network and I would think USB speeds are a lot slower than the Gigabit network interface cards.
I have been using the SOHO Gatekeeper Pro for about 4 months. As an idea it sounds great. Funtionally it is not a practical enterprise solution. For example : whenever the AV database gets updated it slows any function to a crowl. In several instances it just slows browsing, email without even showing that Yoggie's CPU is busy.
Support is horrible. They provide fixes that are broken, in other word no fix. Then they fix the second problem and the support replies that we fixed the issue. While the initial issue is still there.
Additionally, when the automatic update from version 1.3.9 to 1.4.0 they broke the email POP checking and they do not want to fix the issue.
My final thoughts are that it is an unstrustworthy imature security company with bad business practices. Their moto must be "We can break your Yoggie any time we like and we will not support you or fix the issue".
My recomendation is do not buy any equipment from them.
Sorry, but I agree with the previous poster. Access to the internet was very slow after using this devices. Also, the screen snapshots show that the device was NEVER tested against any virus or malware. It's a cumulative graph that can't be refreshed, and they showed ZERO attacks. The device also does not allow any initial secured authentication such as initial logins for things like Yahoo, Gmail,Gdocs, etc with having to be disabled. It must try to block redirected HTTPS authentication. Netflix, wireless printing also do not work. And the "automatic" firmware upgrade to 1.4.0 from 1.3.9 took 50 emails back and forth to tech support to fix. Once it was complete, if fixed none of the above issues.
I bought the Yoggie because it promised to speed up my computer by allowing me to remove Norton which made my pc slow. It actually made surfing the internet slower and receiving emails took for ever.
updates made it worse.