Default gate when load balancing outbound traffic

bpmartin20

I think this must be a common issue, but my search-fu doesn't appear to be working for me today.

I have pfSense 2.2.2 installed with two WANs. I was doing fail-over, but now I want to load-balance outbound traffic across the two WANs instead. (Ideally I'd like to load balance based on traffic loads rather than just round-robin, but pfSense doesn't appear to support that.) I've set up my gateway group listing both WANs in Tier 1. Most write-ups tell me I also need to not have either of them set as the default gateway. I've tried to unset the default-gateway checkbox on WAN1, but when I apply the changes it remains the default gateway. I've tried rebooting, but it doesn't change the situation. So my questions are:

In an outbound load-balancing configuration, does it matter if I have one WAN set as a default gateway?
If it does, how do I remove my existing default gateway?
Bonus points if someone can tell me how to load-balance outbound traffic based on WAN traffic loads rather than just using a round-robin algorithm.

Thanks in advance for any assistance anyone can provide.

phil.davis

You have to have a default gateway. It will normally be one of the gateways in the load-balancing group. If most of your traffic is directed to the load-balancing gateway group by policy-routing rules, then pretty only pfSense itself will be using the default gateway.
N/A, you don't need to remove it.
No bonus points for me. It is just a weighted round-robin, so in a place with only a few users a few people doing big downloads might happen to all get their states on the same WAN. If users are using "download manager" type apps that startup multiple threads downloading different bits of a file, then those threads will start quickly one after the other and are almost certain to end up spread around the gateway group members.