WRAP Board + Loadbalancing?
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Should a WRAP.1C board be enough to loadbalance two 8Mbit cable connections? I can pull ~1.7 Mbytes/sec with BitTorrent, but it makes web browsing or internet radio basically unusable. Even when a torrent is pulling a lot less bandwidth (say, 256 KB/sec) it still slows browsing to a crawl if it has a lot of connections. I have enabled polling, and I've read the WRAP board should be OK to about 35Mbits, so I don't understand why it's slowing things down so much. Is it just the puny 266MHz processor? Or are we battling some other issue?
Thanks,
Alex
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Disable device polling. This mode is not very optimized for wraps yet (see http://wiki.pfsense.com/wikka.php?wakka=Tuning for suggestions how to improve this mode). After disabling monitor your CPU and RAM usage at status>system. If either or get's near 100% the device is too slow for what you want to do. Also monitor states. In case you hit the max states value, but RAM and CPU are not yet fully utilized raise the mx states value at system>advanced.
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Disable device polling.
I agree - My P166 has intel NICs that support polling, but there's a continuous background load imposed, which turns out to be a good 30-40% of CPU on my box.
Test it and see is the best answer.