We are working with a customer who has a pair of Pix515E firewalls. Their application sends a lot of email which the windows boxes that were sending the mail could not keep up with the load. The solution we implemented consisted of 4 Linux hosts to send the mail with all the outbound mail being balanced across those 4 servers.
We cut to the new solution and everything seemed to work really great and then about an hour later there were issues across the board with everything and not just email. Looking in the firewall logs I could see there were "memory allocation errors" that kept showing up. Prior to discovering this we had cut back to the old way of doing things and still were having issues with the mail. I initiated a reboot of the firewall and it immediately failed to the standby unit and everything was back up and running.
We are currently running 8.0(3) with 128 MB or RAM and 16 MB of flash.
Anyone ever see anything similar to this? These firewalls are rather old at this point and one possible solution is to just replace them with something more up to date.
Thanks
Mike
