Does Having A Firewall Slow Your Net Access?

When I have Zone Alarm working I reckon it does or is it my imagination?

Norton Antivirus certainly slows down my net access speeds so thats gone.

 

IDK...Norton's has never slowed my computer down.

 

Once I installed Norton it well and truely F****d up my PC, there have been so many people who have had problems with it.

 

The short answer: yes, especially if its a software firewall (it is consuming processing cyclces as well as analyzing traffic)

The long answer: depends on if your firewall has better throughput then your network card/modem

 

i never noticed any difference running ZA and not.

 

mozilla has a plugin that will do bandwidth testing, or you could try pinging something with ZA on, get some averages, then turn all the firewalls off completly (may have to disable ZA from startup) and then get some avg pings

 

My mckaffe does not appear to slow my net down, nor did my norton antivirus, although I currently use mckaffe for that too. I dunno, I got cable that connects at like 3200 a sec, so even if it did slow me down 30-40 a sec, I wouldnt notice. I can still download at over 150 kb/s on each of 4 simultaneous downloads at the same time when using furthurnet. I am guessing your connection must be lacking to begin with.

 

I use Norton and it's fucking useless. It does a good job but keeps playing up every couple of weeks. Norton will, without doubt slow up the connection but you can get around this by disabling all it's functions except switching on the firewall when you surf. Don't think I'll ever buy Norton again as it's caused more problems than ever.

 

It definatley affects your CPU performance, I can't imagine it slowing your connection though... Theres no reason for it. Unless you have a weak CPU and it can't load the data quick enough...

 

its not whether it slows it down.. its what happens when you dont use a f/w..
i use 2 f/w`s
so i dont use AV cept for trend micros free online housecall.
i dont recomend you copy me unless ya sure you know what ya doing ..
but
go to steve gibsons site and run a leak test.. and check his other apps out.
The DCOMbobulator.. etc