While checking on a performance problem at a site using a NetScreen 5GT firewall, I found that when I accessed the Interface Bandwidth report from the web-based management interface that the report was showing zero Kbps for the utilized bandwidth on all interfaces, which was obviously wrong, since data was flowing through the firewall. I found that I needed to enable traffic shaping mode on the firewall to get that report to actually show the bandwidth being used for the interfaces on the firewall.
Traffic shaping is a mechanism to give certain types of data flows precedence over others with lower priority traffic being buffered. In this case I didn't actually "shape" the traffic, but just enabled traffic shaping mode so that I could see the current bandwidth being used on interfaces.
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