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.

Table 1-2: Notebook network performance test with Yoggie Pico Pro enabled.

Table 1-3: Desktop network performance test with Yoggie Pico Pro disabled.

Table 1-4: Desktop network performance test with Yoggie Pico Pro enabled.

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.