My Symfony page isn&#39;t too slow (it loads in about 400 ms) but considering the fact that it&#39;s just a simple hello world page with basic authentication, it should be loading in less than 100 ms. When I enter the profiler, I see this:

![Profiler timeline][1]

Notice it just says &quot;Firewall&quot; for 250 ms. I thought the firewall was just responsible for keeping users out of certain areas of the page - I can&#39;t imagine that taking any longer than a few milliseconds plus the time it takes to fetch the user information from the database (which in this case is 61 ms).

Could somebody explain what the firewall actually does? If you have any general pointers on how to increase the firewall performance as well that would be greatly appreciated.

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**Note**: I have Googled this of course, and I want to specify up front that I&#39;m connecting to the MySQL database by IP address, not host name. This seemed to be the issue for every other case of slow Symfony firewall I could find.

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Some resources from my project that could be relevant:

  - [security.yaml](http://pastebin.com/sZG4whqD)
  - [routing.yaml](http://pastebin.com/YUEqrmCc)
  - [Astrups/SpectacleBundle/Entity/User.php](http://pastebin.com/wZHSy9Lq)
  - [Astrups/SpectacleBundle/Service/Sha1Salted.php](http://pastebin.com/Wt5yFHhc)

  [1]: http://i.stack.imgur.com/LIklu.png

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What is the Symfony firewall doing that takes so long?