Pfsense 2.3.3-RELEASE-p1 Load Balance
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Hello Everyone,
I'm a rookie about pfsense with internet tutorials i've installed and configured pfsense 2.3.3-RELEASE-p1 and it works perfectly :) I've two Fiber WAN connections i've failed to do Load Balance (merge two connections as one), my system details as below;
LAN : 192.168.1.1
WAN-1 : 192.168.10.1 (20 Mbps Fiber)
WAN-2 : 192.168.20.1 (3 Mbps Fiber)I've followed this tutorial to do so :```
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLWOtduHVU8What i did : 1-) System->Routing->Gateway Groups->Add 2-) Group Name : MERGE 3-) WAN-1->TIER 1 + WAN-2->TIER 1 4-) Trigger Level : Packet Loss or High Latency 5-) Description : WAN1_WAN2_MERGED 6-) System->Advanced->Miscellaneous->Enable default gateway switching (Checked) As far as i understand from tutorials after this steps when i goto``` http://www.speedtest.net ```i should see 23 Mbps (or close) speed, but i didn't. Before those steps i was getting approx. 19 Mbps with speed test and after those steps i'm still getting the same result. This test performing on Closed network,i mean there is only one client,client connected via Cable not wifi, all ethernet cards are 1000Mb/Gigabit and all Cables are CAT6. What am i missing or what am i understanding wrong with load balance :) Thanks for advance and so sorry for bad English :)
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Each single state ("thread" of download/upload) has to live on a single WAN. To the upstream server the packets back and forth have to come from/to the same WAN IP. So a single-threaded download can only run at the speed of the WAN which it gets allocated to.
When the WANs are equal bandwidth, the strategy is to put each new connection onto the next WAN, spreading then umber of connections on each WAN equally. Statistically then the WANs should experience about equal load (e.g. if there are 50 "connections" on each then it is likely that the "connections" that are actually wanting lots of bandwidth will be spread between the WANs).
If there are only a few connections, then maybe the ones that want bandwidth happen to have been mostly allocated to WAN1 and those that are more idle are on WAN2. In that case, bad luck, WAN1 will be saturated while WAN2 has free bandwidth.
If there are significantly different bandwidths on each WAN then you need to put weights on the WANs in the gateway group (they are on the GUI), so that most connections get allocated to the WAN with more bandwidth.
If you use a download manager that downloads bits of the file in parallel, then it will make multiple connections and those will (most likely) be spread around the WANs in the gateway group. So you could see total file download speed near the summ of the WAN speeds.
Note: You did not mention doing anything with rules. You need to put a rule on LAN that will feed traffic destined for "the internet" into the gateway group. Without doing that, all your traffic will just go out the default gateway.
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Each single state ("thread" of download/upload) has to live on a single WAN. To the upstream server the packets back and forth have to come from/to the same WAN IP. So a single-threaded download can only run at the speed of the WAN which it gets allocated to.
When the WANs are equal bandwidth, the strategy is to put each new connection onto the next WAN, spreading then umber of connections on each WAN equally. Statistically then the WANs should experience about equal load (e.g. if there are 50 "connections" on each then it is likely that the "connections" that are actually wanting lots of bandwidth will be spread between the WANs).
If there are only a few connections, then maybe the ones that want bandwidth happen to have been mostly allocated to WAN1 and those that are more idle are on WAN2. In that case, bad luck, WAN1 will be saturated while WAN2 has free bandwidth.
If there are significantly different bandwidths on each WAN then you need to put weights on the WANs in the gateway group (they are on the GUI), so that most connections get allocated to the WAN with more bandwidth.
If you use a download manager that downloads bits of the file in parallel, then it will make multiple connections and those will (most likely) be spread around the WANs in the gateway group. So you could see total file download speed near the summ of the WAN speeds.
Note: You did not mention doing anything with rules. You need to put a rule on LAN that will feed traffic destined for "the internet" into the gateway group. Without doing that, all your traffic will just go out the default gateway.
@phil.davis thanks for explanation,now it's much more clear for me,you are right i forgot to mention about firewall setting,i did configure as you mentioned, with IDM downloads speed makes different (it uses two WAN at the same time).
Thanks for your time.