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This paper presents a preliminary performance analysis of a complex middlebox infrastructure in a real-world production environment that serves several thousand people. While prevalent, middleboxes (firewalls, NATs, etc.) have yet to be systematically measured. This paper makes two contributions: (i) we outline several methodologies and metrics by which to measure middleboxes and (ii) we offer preliminary application-layer measurements of one particular production middlebox system. We show that the middlebox infrastructure in question offers a mixed bag of performance implications (both positive and negative). In addition, we quantify several failure modes introduced by the middlebox infrastructure.
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Mark Allman (2003) studied this question.