Gateway Groups Loadbalancing performance

[mikeisfly]

Please see Image below:

I was testing the load balancing capabilities of PfSense by connecting 8 WAN connections to my firewall. I have to say that I'm very impressed by how well it scales. Here are the speeds of each modem individually:

Download Upload Ping(ms)
WAN1 180.27 24.24 10
WAN2 141.45 22.68 10
WAN3 180.52 24.12 10
WAN4 240.17 12.17 10
WAN5 179.89 24.23 10
WAN6 180.28 24.21 10
WAN7 180.36 24.04  10
WAN8 240.19 12.19 10

Total      1523.13      167.88

I got 61.34% of the download speed and 87.15% of the upload. I know what your thinking 61% that's not that good. Well I'm on a gigabit network so my theoretical max is 1 Gaps. I believe I would have gotten closer to the max but I was maxing out the fiber optic nodes that these coaxial cable modems were connected to. I'm also hitting the max upload performance of the nodes as well. Just wanted to say good job keep up the good work!

Test info:

Computer running the test was a Dell OptiPlex i5 (980 I think) 4 GB ram running Server 2012 (Chrome Browser) using the built in gigabit nic.

PfSense is running on a i5 OptiPlex 980 as well 4Gbps of ram. The built-in nic is connected to a brocade FastIron 648P POE which is the LAN port running 17 VLANs

The WAN is connected to one port of a  dual gigabit port Intel NIC. A cisco C3550-I5Q3L2-M switch is what I'm using as a WAN Aggregator. The WAN port on PfSense is running 9 VLANs. The modems are spread across two nodes which have no real world users.

PfSense version:

2.4.0-BETA (amd64)
built on Tue Feb 28 13:16:27 CST 2017
FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE-p8

CPU:

Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2400 CPU @ 3.10GHz
Current: 3100 MHz, Max: 3101 MHz
4 CPUs: 1 package(s) x 4 core(s)

I would have created a LAGG Group but PfSense doesn't allow a VLAN on a LAGG port to be assigned to a WAN interface. If anyone would like for to test anything let me know and I will try to get you the info asap.

P.S.
Although I am a employee of a very large ISP, I do not speak for them or endorse PfSense on their behalf. I have been a user of PfSense almost from the beginning and thought that I would share this very cool information with everyone. I personally have loved the project from almost the beginning and have personally recommended it!

[mikeisfly]

I should mention that if I choose any combination of WAN connections regardless if the speeds are similar or not and the scaling is additive (As long as I stay below the max speed of my nodes). Far better than the days of having to add the slower speed connections in multiples of the larger.