Improve web filter speed by using Local Content Filtering Database–Sophos UTM

Issue

• You experience a slow down in web browsing when using the Sophos UTM as a Web proxy.
• Sometime you see the high latency, slow web browsing when enable Web filtering in Sophos UTM.

Best practice

• Update to newest version of Sophos UTM (current is 9.3xx)
• Download the Content Filtering Database to local Memory (RAM). This method is not Sophos official
  • Faster URL checking by category
  • Reduce bandwidth usage
  • Reduce connection to Internet from the devices
  • Higher web filter performance

Important notes

• That’s not official, you do it with your risk.
• Revert to default setting: cc set http sc_local_db none
• When you disable/enable the web proxy, database will download again.
• If you set local database in “disk”, the CPU 100% maybe occur because of the high HDD reading.
• The UTM recommends more than 4GB or 8GB Memory
• The local content filtering database is stored in HDD, cached in RAM

How to do

1. Enable Shell Access

Management > System Settings > Shell Access > Set password for loginuser and root.

Allow network: Your local LAN > Click Apply

2. SSH to the UTM

Using Putty software to SSH to the UTM

Login as: loginuser

Type “su” to go to root mode

3. Verify DB settings

cc get http sc_local_db

4. Set the database as local

cc set http sc_local_db mem

5. Reload the HTTPPROXY service

/var/mdw/scripts/httpproxy restart

6. Verify first DB download

Web surfing will be stopped until done – about 380-400 MB

ls -lh /var/chroot-http/var/pattern/sfcontrol

7. Verify DB in Memory

 

8. Command options:

cc set http sc_local_db [none,disk,mem]

none     – default, don’t use local categorization at all use online query as default.

disk     – use local Database, but use it only on disk. Useful for boxes with little RAM.

mem     – use local Database, and keep it in memory for faster access.