Load balance looks like it's teaming when it shouldn't?

[bkandor]

Hi,

I have a load balance rule set for 2 identical cable modem connections.  Everything works.  The strange thing is when I run speedtest,  I see speeds that are about 1.5+ times what a single wan should give.  That's not my understanding of Load balancing, i.e. a round robin usage of the 2 wan gateways.  so,  I see 20 down instead of 13 and 2.2 up instead of 1.2  (I know, cable is slow where I live).

Maybe speedtest is a single request and it's splitting it that way?  Confusing…

[phil.davis]

The conclusion is that speedtest is "multi-threaded" - it starts multiple sessions between your client and the server end. And thus pfSense load-balances them.
To test just 1 link you need to find a "use just one download thread" button on the speed test, or put a special rule in your rule set that matches the traffic from your test client and sends it to a particular gateway, rather then the load-balanced gateway group.

[edwardwong]

Maybe setting up iperf to do test can better reflect the performance, you can control how many thread to be used to carry out test, so it will be easier to simulate different environment.

[bkandor]

Thanks,  I"ll look into that.  It is definately nice, but unexpected.  For e.g.,  doing a large steam download tonight, single item,  both wans are at full saturation.  It never ever worked like this when I load balanced on my Asus router (rt-ac66u).  So I'm very happy  :D