Performance Evaluation of Snort System

Most studies in the past in testing and benchmarking on Intrusion Detection System (IDS) were conducted as comparisons, rather than evaluation, on different IDSs. This paper presents the evaluation of the performance of one of the open source IDS, snort, in an inexpensive high availability system configuration. Redundancy and fault tolerance technology are used in deploying such IDS, because of the possible attacks that can make snort exhaust resources, degrade in performance and even crash. Several test data are used in such environment and yielded different results. CPU speed, Disk usage, memory utilization and other resources of the IDS host are also monitored. Test results with the proposed system configuration environment shows much better system availability and reliability, especially on security systems.