I have configured the heX router with dual WAN Load balancing and Failover. But i do feel something is wrong in the configuration. Can someone help me find the mistake in the configuration below. Thanks in advance.
Hi, thanks for the reply. I want to know whether the firewall mangle/nat rules and routes are configured right to achieve the load balancing & failover.
I feel like the traffic is not evenly balanced and passed through both ISP. I have 2 ISPs each with 200Mbps connection. So i should get a 400 Mbps bandwidth. But sometimes i’m getting around 360-380Mbps and sometimes 180-200Mbps that is passed through only one ISP.
Any client-only ‘load balancing’ is really ‘load sharing’. When a new connection is assigned to a particular WAN then all traffic is via that WAN for the duration of the connection, be it only a couple of kB in a second or many GB over hours - you will never achieve an exact 50/50 split.
When benchmarking using torrent, you should get net throughput very close to sum of both ISP throughputs because torrent uses maaany concurrent connections to many peers which is ideal for your kind of load balancing.The exact result still depends on how peers perform though.
For streaming you will almost certainly always be limited to using single ISP line as streaming usually uses single connection end there’s nothing to be balanced between the two ISP lines.
For speed test, which uses multiple connections (but small number of connections never the less) the results will be more varying … sometimes you might get almost sum of both links, sometimes less. I’m not sure how much speedtest client communicates with server and if the fact that same client binary accesses server via two different IP addresses bothers server (and consequently client)? No idea.
Your rules from a quick look, are fine…
What i would be worried about, is that as you said, sometimes while you re doing speed tests, is that only one line of a specific ISP is used…
It seems impossible that when doing speed tests or downloading from Torrent, there is zero traffic to the second ISP…
Something seems to not be working as it should… Or i understood something wrong …
Not impossible. But probability of it happen is 1 divided by 2 to the power of (N-1) (where N is number of active torrent peers). E.g. if number of active torrent peers is 11, then possibility of only one ISP line being used is around one in a thousand.
If things are all working right then seeing sharing ratios different than 200:200 is matter of statistics. As I explained it is most probable to see even ratio, but some odd ratios are possible but you should not see that too often.
Since we’re talking about two ISPs with different backbone and peering, it is very possible to see some systematic difference (one ISP line persistently performing better than the other). But that still wouldn’t indicate any error in router’s configuration or performance.
But not impossible. If somebody has too much time and is checking performance every few seconds (or has enabled graphing), then seeing this happen now and then is a reality and might trigger some sort of anxiety attack .
Just wanted to prepare user for this to gappdn so that we don’t have to deal with it at that time (it’s easier to do it now when the details are still fresh in our minds).
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