Smoothwall Updates Slowing internet too <1Mb

[machy]

We have a bit of a weird issue with Smoothwall cloud filtering.

 

Every time someone hits "Publish" on the filtering page, a few minutes later a significant portion of the trust end up with unusably slow internet for 5-10 minutes (and sometimes completely unusable) then slow internet for around 40 Minutes.

At my site we go from a Gig download to 500kbps on a speed test 

Were quite a big trust so this has happened a few times.

And then it seems like this morning Smoothwall pushed out a filter list update which caused the same issue.

 

 

Has anyone else experienced this? 

 

 

 

 

an example for clarity:

 

Tech from Site A Adds a url into (site everyone allowed)

Tech from Site A publishes changes 

normally 3-5 Minutes later most other schools in the trust start experiencing slow downs / loss of internet 

5-10 Minutes after that speeds improve but are slow

 

 

NB; We do have a ticket with Smoothwall at the trust level, but i don't know what's going on there. 

[tom_newton]

We've seen this at a few sites, and we are working on ways to minimise the bandwidth usage 

[DWilson1997]

We've seen similar performance issues with the cloud filter extension, but tends to effect our device when you open edge for the first time after a reboot - takes up to 20 mins to start working, and as we have a SharePoint page as our homepage it rarely loads anything during that time. Haven't had it when publishing changes.

 

I have raised with smoothwall and they advised they couldn't replicate the issue and wanted us to do some testing. Unfortunately it was causing such a negative impact we had to remove it for staff devices temporarily, so haven't been able to do any more testing yet - was going to look into it over the summer.

[tom_newton]

I think I remember your case - an odd one, certainly.

The things that take time/bandwidth are:

Downloading the rule lists (which are usually patched, unless the client has been offline a long time, so tiny), this happens 1x per day usually, although there was a recent update in the middle of the day to solve an urgent issue.

Downloading the policy - this happens once-per-publish. These arent patched, or compressed. We will add compression ASAP. Also we have plans to make them more targetted, and so smaller.

 

These things both take time to ingest, too, but usually under a second for each.

[TSEARS]

On 27/06/2025 at 13:13, DWilson1997 said:

We've seen similar performance issues with the cloud filter extension, but tends to effect our device when you open edge for the first time after a reboot - takes up to 20 mins to start working, and as we have a SharePoint page as our homepage it rarely loads anything during that time. Haven't had it when publishing changes.

 

I have raised with smoothwall and they advised they couldn't replicate the issue and wanted us to do some testing. Unfortunately it was causing such a negative impact we had to remove it for staff devices temporarily, so haven't been able to do any more testing yet - was going to look into it over the summer.

Were you able to solve this issue? We have experienced this for the past month and the student devices (Surface Go) are almost unusable with many parents complaint as they are on a 1:1 lease. 

It takes 20 minutes for the page to load, and even after this web browsing is very very slow.  

[Joeloman]

I don't think this has anything to do with Smoothwall.
Chrome and Edge made an update about 1 month ago that made the browser extremely slow, especially at startup, so many extensions have had to update their code to make the system work even on computers with low resources.

 

What I think you should try on a test computer.
In Chrome/Edge, try turning off graphics hardware acceleration and then restarting.
If that doesn't help, turn off all extensions and see how it works.
Then just turn on Smoothwall Cloud Filter and test.. if it works, then turn on one extension at a time until you find the one that slows down the system.

 

If the error turns out to be with the Smoothwall extension, open a support ticket.

 

Let us all know how it went with the test for you..

[TechMonkey]

2 hours ago, TSEARS said:

Were you able to solve this issue? We have experienced this for the past month and the student devices (Surface Go) are almost unusable with many parents complaint as they are on a 1:1 lease. 

It takes 20 minutes for the page to load, and even after this web browsing is very very slow.  

What devices is this happening on?  We have had a similar issue but only on our latest batch of staff Lenovo devices. It is definitely Cloud Filter but is not happening on older Lenovos or Dells. We have also noted it is intermittent, but when it hits internet is unusable.

Edited March 20 by TechMonkey

[TSEARS]

We already tested this and uninstalled the Smoothwall Cloud Filter extension on a couple of devices and as soon as we did, it was working perfectly so we know its related to the extension. We logged a ticket last week and have escalated to third-line support , but I came across this thread and was interested to find out if/what was resolution was. 

[TSEARS]

6 minutes ago, TechMonkey said:

What devices is this happening on?  We have had a similar issue but only on our latest batch of staff Lenovo devices.

Its a strange one, we are having the issue with all of our Surface Go devices, but we have Surface Pro devices for our older students which seem to be fine. 

But outside of web browsing the device is fast and snappy, so not sure if its due to the lower spec as I'd expect the rest of the OS to be sluggish if it was struggling. 

Edited March 20 by TSEARS

[TechMonkey]

This matches what we are seeing too. The device is fine, it is just web traffic, and only on these certain devices.  Disable or remove Cloud Filter and it is fine. I have a ticket open and it was escalated to 2nd line straight away.

[TSEARS]

Glad to know its not just us! Ours is with third-line at the moment, so hopefully there will be movement on this soon as we have some very unhappy students, parents and teachers... 

[tom_newton]

I believe there has been a regression in Chromium that is causing some issues, which we hope will be fixed soon

[Soundish]

We had this initial slow speed issue too, as soon as you bypass the cloud filter its fine.

Got a ticket open too but it's stumped them as well.

Doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to what device or user it happens to though, other than if it happens to you, it happens every day just with some variation to length of time.

We have had success in disabling Ipv6 on the network adaptor of an affected device though, we're just working on a script to turn off Ipv6 across all our devices.

 

Very odd issue.

[TSEARS]

We have installed the latest version of the Edge (147.0.3912.72) which apparently resolves the issue but we are still facing issues. Has anyone got anywhere with support?

We have very angry parents who are paying for the 1:1 devices which are basically unusable... 

[tom_newton]

Drop me a pm, I'll get this escalated to engineering 

[ITGuyNW]

Is this affecting users no matter the number of devices on cloud filter?

 

We have pushed it out here to laptops with no bother, but now pondering whether to give it to desktops too however this may affect bandwidth if the above is true?

[mitchell1981]

Is this still an ongoing issue for anyone? We've been getting complaints about our Surface Go 2 laptops for a while now. I finally got around to testing one today, and the internet speed is very poor. I've not tried disabling the cloud filter yet as it's all enforced by intune and it's tricky to disable it. Is there a known quick fix such as just updating Edge or Windows? Thanks.

[DWilson1997]

Ours was a conflict between Senso Cloud + Smoothwall, disabling senso cloud resolved the issue on devices and we are moving them over to Senso V2.

[TSEARS]

We rolled the verison of Edge back to 142 from the latest, which resolved the issue. Apparently Smoothwall have released a new version of Smoothwall Cloud FIlter which helps the performance in Edge. So far from testing it seems stable, but our students are away on holidays so unable to test fully.

 

Release notes on the new version of the Edge extension for July mention fixing the issue with slow browsing.

 

Which version of Edge and Clould Filter are you using?

[tom_newton]

The performance issue with browser versions likely would not be bandwidth restricting (senso is indeed a good candidate for that!) - that should be resolved with the latest update, although there's still a bug in Chrome and Edge on windows that pushes the extension into efficiency mode incorrectly. I believe it is being worked on by the chrome team. 

[TSEARS]

On 21/07/2026 at 08:55, TSEARS said:

We rolled the verison of Edge back to 142 from the latest, which resolved the issue. Apparently Smoothwall have released a new version of Smoothwall Cloud FIlter which helps the performance in Edge. So far from testing it seems stable, but our students are away on holidays so unable to test fully.

 

Release notes on the new version of the Edge extension for July mention fixing the issue with slow browsing.

 

Which version of Edge and Clould Filter are you using?

I'm afraid to report that now that all our students are back and have tested the new extension, it's not working, and we are facing the same issues as before.

Performance in Edge is really, really slow. We've had to roll back to version 142 of Edge, which seems to work much better. 

 

We have reopened the ticket with Smoothwall. Is everyone else having the same issue? Seems to only be on lower spec devices which have the issue 

[tom_newton]

There is an update to edge due today - 153 - that we expect to resolve some issues. 

 

Can you ping me your ticket number? 

[tom_newton]

(no worries I found it)