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    Load-Balancing "equally" distributes load according to the slowest WAN line?

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Routing and Multi WAN
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    • S
      stramato
      last edited by

      Hello, just a quick question. I have 3 DSL lines in my pfSense 2.0 box all in Tier1 for load balance.

      The 3 lines have different speeds. 8Mb/1Mb, 5Mb/0.6Mb and 4Mb/0.43Mb. They are all in Tier1.

      I have max 330 concurrent users (at 2PM weekdays) with 1.5Mb/0.25Mb Captive Portal limit per user. I love RRD Graphs.

      Now, I examine my Traffic RRD Graphs after 1-month of use. It appears that My LAN Traffic 95-percentile is at 11.92Mbps. I examine each WAN connection and they have similar 95-percentiles (download), which is at around 4Mbps each.

      Is this just because I'm not using all of my bandwidth, or is the load-balancer "balancing" the bandwidth by trying to distribute the traffic equally (which in my case, the fastest my slowest connection can achieve, which is 4Mbps)?

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      • jimpJ
        jimp Rebel Alliance Developer Netgate
        last edited by

        No, it's done on a per-connection basis and there is no relationship between them in terms of bandwidth used.

        The only way that could likely happen would be if you enabled the traffic shaper and set that bandwidth on each WAN.

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        • S
          stramato
          last edited by

          @jimp:

          No, it's done on a per-connection basis and there is no relationship between them in terms of bandwidth used.

          The only way that could likely happen would be if you enabled the traffic shaper and set that bandwidth on each WAN.

          Ok thanks jimp. I have my Traffic Shaper off, so I guess it's just a coincidence that my WAN's are averaging at 4Mbps. I guess I still have some little more headroom.

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