|  |  | To discover how fast the hardware of your firewall can operate, you must benchmark your network performance prior to installing the firewall. One way to test your network is to set up your firewall with one rule that passes all traffic; then, after setting your complete ruleset, compare the network's performance against your benchmark. If you experience a serious slowdown then you probably need to update your hardware. Any device that will be making decisions on every packet traversing your corporate network must have enough processing power to handle this task without slowing down network performance.