Which effect on system performance should I expect?

[DirtyHarry]

Hello,

I have a RHEL 4 server with Plesk installed; it is a Celeron 1.7 Ghz with just 1GB of RAM. I have a series of fairly popular websites on it, and I would like to know which kind of effect on system performance I could get from installing grsecurity.

I know my machine is old, but if possible, I would like to install grsecurity and take full advantage of it.

Thank you!

[PaX Team]

I have a series of fairly popular websites on it, and I would like to know which kind of effect on system performance I could get from installing grsecurity.

most of the performance impact comes from PaX and the grsec ACL system, so the final effect depends on how much you make use of them (seems like you want most of it . non-exec pages and randomization will probably cost you on the order of 2-3% (that's the impact on kernel compilation, i assume the fork/execve/mmap appetite of apache is not that much worse than gcc's). i don't know numbers for recent versions of the ACL system, but it used to be a few % points before as well, maybe spender has something to add here .

[DirtyHarry]

Thanks a lot for the reply (sorry I couldn't reply earlier but had some issue with my ISP... and I am still currently on dial-up).

I will test grsecurity and try to take a look on performance then. If I had a newer server I would install it with no second thoughts. Thanks for the help and the great work!