Firewall slow on off toggle

I normally operate the firewall GlassWire in ‘Ask To Connect’ mode which works great. Occasionally I will need to drop the firewall for brief period. Recently I have found that this takes longer than expected. Turning the firewall off takes 54 seconds. Turning it back on takes 18 seconds. I am sure these used be be near instantaneous operations. Is it processing each rule individually rather than simply operating a ‘master switch’.

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Yes, the more complicated the rules the longer it can take to turn the firewall on/off. It’s due to the API we use and there isn’t much we can do about it unfortunately.

I will share this with our team to see if something has changed since we last investigated this problem.

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Thanks. I know Windows Defender monitors firewall changes and so perhaps that is a factor?

No, it shouldn’t have anything to do with Defender at all.

Consider yourself lucky. It takes mine 13 minutes to turn off and 13 minutes to turn on. Its ridiculous.

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I normally don’t switch GlassWire all the way off, just change it to “Click to Block” and it still alerts me every time a new connection is made, although outgoing connections are no longer blocked by default. This is handy when running installers that may fail if the internet is unavailable to them.

There is still a bit of delay during the change, as the firewall rules still need to be massaged via the Windows API.

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I find that switching between modes takes much longer if you have a lot of rules. Turning the firewall off/on already takes a long time, but the mode switch is much slower.

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Time for an API change then I think; waiting 5-10 minutes to switch firewall modes is ridiculous (and unacceptable really).

Can’t say I will be continuing my subscription past my remaining time if this doesn’t get better, I’ve never seen another app take so long…

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The fact that old rules for previous versions are never cleaned up has got to be a factor.

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Yes this topic has been going on for years now.
I know you you can in the Windows Firewall and do a clean up, but i did notice when i did that, GW still kept the old entries in it’s DB…

In my experience, GlassWire will then put any cleaned up entries back into Firewall.
There is the nuclear option, which is to do a full factory reset of all firewall settings during the installation. But that is hardly an acceptable solution.

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Hi everyone,

I would like to confirm that we are currently working on this and there should be an improvement in our next release (within the next 2 weeks).

Best,
Katie

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How can you do a cleanup in Windows Defender? I hope it’s not the Firewall & network protection > Allow an app through firewall > manually remove records!

That is great news! It seems that I came searching for this in exactly right time!

If you do this, could you please also consider apps that update often using stand-alone installers?

In this example, Dropbox pops up every 2-3 days and it’s so annoying that I just hit block sometimes out of frustration and only update once in a while.

  1. Setting a matching pattern rule for cases like these to automatically block/unblock would be great!

    • Pattern matching folder or executable name, or remote connection address, to make sure it can’t be spoofed.
  2. Automatic cleanup of the old matched entries when new is introduced would also be amazing!

    • this way the new app effectively replaces the old one, yet in edge cases, if the old app makes an appearance, it will still pop up and asks you to allow/block it.
  3. Manual cleanup using the searchbox, then selecting all and removing all at once is almost a must and would help a lot.

  4. The cleanup would also make things much faster as just changing one of these three options in the screenshot takes several minutes. - Firewall ON/OFF, Ask to Connect, Profile.

  5. I even thought it just hangs and kept restarting the app or PC, because it didn’t seem to ever finish. This is such a major oversight, the UI should better communicate that it is working in the background the whole time and that restarting could possibly break things. Little progressbar would not hurt.

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v3.3.630 has been released which finally includes housekeeping of firewall rules!

After installing it did a pretty good job of clearing out the 200+ old firewall entries I had for Opera. There was still a handful left and I had to delete the corresponding entries in the Inactive Apps category in GlassWire.

Looking through Inactive Apps I have hundreds of entries for updaters of Office, Teams, Edge, Creative Cloud. All of these have still have firewall rules. Anything other than the most recent version is just bloat. Version information is only shown when you click on an entry and the ordering in GlassWire appears to be quite random; e.g. v114, 101, 114, 106, 109, 103, 105. So entries have to be checked and deleted one-by-one which makes cleaning up the entries incredibly tedious.

Wouldn’t a purge orphaned firewall rules feature make sense in this case if it can improve the firewalls performance?

Removing the build up of old and duplicate entries make a massive difference to the time it takes to perform firewall operations. Previously, turning off took 54 seconds, this now takes less than 10. Turning back on is less than a second. It is great that it is now possible to purge the firewall bloat. The trouble is the limited options for pruning the unwanted entries. You can either delete all your entries and start over, or alternatively delete and then confirm individual entries one at a time.