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yes a firewall can slow down your internet.

btw. welcome to the forum

Thank you for answering my question.

The reason i asked the question is, I installed Kaspersky Internet Security 6.0 trial.
Since all of my testmy download tests have increased alot

Here is the latest test.

::::::::::.. Download Stats ..::::::::::
Download Connection is:: 8560 Kbps about 8.6 Mbps (tested with 12160 kB)
Download Speed is:: 1045 kB/s
Tested From:: http://testmy.net/ (Server 2)
Test Time:: 2006/11/04 - 9:41am
Bottom Line:: 149X faster than 56K 1MB Download in 0.98 sec
Tested from a 12160 kB file and took 11.637 seconds to complete
Download Diagnosis:: Awesome! 20% + : 79.38 % faster than the average for host (rr.com)
D-Validation Link:: http://testmy.net/stats/id-3MEP1TANZ
User Agent:: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0

If I uninstall KIs 6.0 and go back to using the windows firewall my down load speed drops about 1,000 Kbps.
I also tried this with F-Secure Internet Security 7.0 and the slower download speed occurs with this also.
But reinstall KIs 6.0 and the speed increases again.
I have cleared the caches each time I run the download test, and tests with KIs 6.0 installed are all consistantly higher.  Like the example above.

I'm using RR 8000/512 service.

Increased? That's unusual. What are your advertised speeds?

My advertised speed is 8000 download and 512 upload.

Sorry it took so long to reply, I just now got back home.

This is the test I did just now.

::::::::::.. Upload Stats ..::::::::::
Upload Connection is:: 485 Kbps about 0.5 Mbps (tested with 1013 kB)
Upload Speed is:: 59 kB/s
Tested From:: http://testmy.net/ (Server 1)
Test Time:: 2006/11/05 - 4:51am
Bottom Line:: 8X faster than 56K 1MB Upload in 17.36 sec
Tested from a 1013 kB file and took 17.105 seconds to complete
Upload Diagnosis:: Awesome! 20% + : 20.65 % faster than the average for host (rr.com)
U-Validation Link:: http://testmy.net/stats/id-W0L2RQJYZ
User Agent:: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0

Kaspersky Firewall is one of them! It eats so much of your download speed.

I've been using Zone Alarm for years and it hasn't reduced my download or upload speeds. I have performed tests with ZA both enabled and disabled. However, I will admit that this is a somewhat common complaint.

Thanks Coknuk for the greetings .. well one thing, just wondering why it seems that Windows Firewall is not common user wise.  May be due to the manual configuration that need to be done but there are softwares with simple wizard to configure it easily.

Also, as I have a Linksys router with a built-in firewall, Zone alarm or any other firewall rarerly show any attack from Internet as the router firewall is taking care of that.

The filtering machanism of Firewalls may cause drop in quality of data going across but also depending on the PC configs the resources will have to be capable to offer required memory to Firewall activity.

thanks

Windows Xp firewall is incoming only , and as usefull as a chocolate tea pot IMHO
and I have found zone alarm slows my computer ,

One other point to consider. Make sure you only use one firewall at a time. I have seen instances of internet security suites conflicting with the Windows firewall in XP. Friend of mine had that happen with McAfee, but I can't remember what version he was using.

i turned off default windows firewall and used comodo firewall pro but decided to uninstall it since i don't store very important data and no credit card or bank account numbers whatsoever in my pc.

this has given me a much improved speed.

before:



now: