Public bug reported:

Explanation :

It has been brought to my attention that Ubuntu kernel 4.4 has a severe
netfilter regression affecting the performance of "/sbin/iptables"
command, especially when adding large number of policies. My source have
documented everything here[2].

I was able to reproduce the situation on my side, and a kernel bisect
identified the same offending commit[1] as my source found for this bug.

Running the commit right before the offending one have proven to have
expected performance :

# commit [71ae0dff] <== Offending commit
real 0m33.314s
user 0m1.520s
sys 0m26.192s

# commit [d7b59742] <== Right before offending commit
real 0m5.952s
user 0m0.124s
sys 0m0.220s

Reproducer :

$ iptables -F
$ echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
$ time (./list-addrs 3000 | xargs -n1 iptables -A FORWARD -j ACCEPT -s)

"list-addrs" script can be found here[3]

Note :

* "iptables-restore" doesn't suffer of that netfilter regression, and
I'm also aware that "iptables-restore" is the favourite approach since
it is way more efficient that iptables that is executed over and over,
once for each policy one want to set, but since "/sbin/iptables" takes
vastly longer to perform with that commit, I think this need to be
address anyway.

* I also tried with the latest and greatest iptables upstream code, and
got the same result.

Reference :
[1] - 
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/71ae0dff02d756e4d2ca710b79f2ff5390029a5f
[2] - https://gist.github.com/williammartin/b75e3faf5964648299e4d985413e6c0c
[3] - 
https://gist.github.com/williammartin/b75e3faf5964648299e4d985413e6c0c#file-list-addrs

** Affects: linux (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: Incomplete

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1640786

Title:
  netfilter regression introducing a performance slowdown in iptables

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