Does failover perform a round robin?

[yacud]

Just wondering I have this scenario. I have 2 WAN and 1 LAN and configure for failover. Thus, failover do round-robin fashion?
or only one WAN will be active and another one is just waiting for the other to be down before it will take over?

[Rico]

Same tier = load balance
lower tier = preferred in failover
Check out https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/multiwan/load-balance-and-failover.html

-Rico

[yacud]

@rico thank you so much for the reply the only thing that somehow bugs me is this I configure it this way
WAN 1 tier 1 10Mb
WAN 2 tier 2 10Mb
configured for failover
would this mean or is this possible if Tier 1 bandwidth already consumed the 10Mb(max out) the other bandwidth will be consumed in Tier 2? even if the configuration is failover and not load balance?
Or the failover automatically load balance?

[mmiller7]

@yacud With failover and multiple tiers, it will use the Tier1 gateways until it meets the criteria of a failure (specified packet loss or latency).

Then it will route all traffic on the Tier2 gateway until Tier1 gateway is back within acceptable limits.

If you want to load balance you could set multiple gateways as Tier1 and it will split traffic between them, you can set a "weight" in the gateway options to have it balance the traffic unevenly (e.g. put 2x as much on WAN1 vs WAN2)

As far as I know, there is no way for it to know what the maximum throughput of your link is - just trying to split it evenly if you want load balancing.