How does the ASA process traffic?

[Craddockc]

Community,

Does the Cisco ASA X series process all traffic by using a process based switching/routing mechanism or does it invoke ASICs and hardware to forward the traffic? For instance a switch will use ASICs and TCAMs as well as CEF to forward frames/packets in hardware without having to interrupt the CPU everytime, even for things like L4 inspection of ACLs. Does the ASA have the same functionality? I cannot find any CEF related commands or TCAM related commands the ASA. Thanks.

[Mohammad Alhyari]

Yo,

Transformers the dark side of the moon. 

The ASA has two forwarding planes:

slow path:  used for initial packets in connections, such as syn packets. and so on. used to build the fast path entry.

fast path : used to forward the rest of packets that belong to a connection.

I can't say anything other than this being done in software. 

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/security/asa/asa-command-reference/show_asp_drop/show_asp_drop.html

[Mohammad Alhyari]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_PIX