Some performance elements of GOS 4.3 vs. its predecessor GOS 4.2

One of the main differences between GOS 4.3 and the previous release GOS 4.2 from a technical perspective is the updated underlying base system, including an upgrade of the database management system.The GVM stack remained unchanged in these two versions.

I was interested in having some figures of whether the updated base system will help to increase performance for large scale scans on my GSM 650. Prior to the upgrade to GOS 4.3 I started multiple tasks in parallel to search for TLS certificates on port 443 on about 256.000 hosts in total. Included were some vulnerability tests on the certificate and TLS service. After upgrading to GOS 4.3, I repeated the same test.

In total, the scans finished between 5% and 7% faster with GOS 4.3. The overall improvement was from 33h to 31h or 5.8% (while obtaining the same scan results).

Of course this is just a spotlight as doing scans in the public, open Internet is always influenced by time-outs, how many hosts are regarded alive and all the other factors we are all aware of. The absolute value may differ a lot when scanning other targets and of course when applying a different scan scope. However, the relative comparison indicate a notable positive effect.

In the performance charts below you can see the two scans with the upgrade in-between. The occasional peaks are due to intermediate analysis of the situation.

Since the performance graph told me that the GSM 650 was not impressed by the task I gave it, I was curious and doubled the target to 512.000 hosts (the same 256K as before plus additional 256K).

With 32h the overall scan time was almost the same as before. The parallelization worked very efficiently. I did not do any performance tuning on the scan configuration, just used the defaults. As you see from the
performance charts, the GSM 650 was still not impressed and asking for even more :grinning:

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