Point to Point Packet loss
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We recently set up a point to point VPN from our office in San Diego to a colo facility in Las Vegas. The setup was super easy, everything just worked after following the how to documents. That said, whenever we push traffic that is near our circuit capacity (5mbps) we start to see packet loss. I was thinking that it may be related to UDP v. TCP so I changed the link to TCP with no visible improvement in packet loss. Do I need to enable some kind of shaping to keep the usage down under our ISP imposed cap or is there another possible cause I am overlooking? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
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UDP is better than TCP when it comes to packet loss (Google TCP over TCP if you want to know why).
Some packet loss is normal when you're hitting your bandwidth limit, just the nature of networking. How much packet loss are you seeing?
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I was seeing as high as 4% when no limiters/qos was enabled. I turned on the limiters inside pfSense and the drop rate went down to less than 1% or so.
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You might also make sure your not seeing any duplex mismatch issues, is the packet loss seen both inbound and outbound or 1 way only?
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There was a duplex mismatch as well. Got that corrected too. Between that and the limiter the loss is much better (max of 1.6% during heavy traffic).