PCC vs ECMP load balancing

RouterOS General
1

Hi

For a setup with 3 equal DSL lines (10mb download / 1mb upload), with 15-50 active clients (half with fixed computers, half with mobile phones), with normal user navigation (web surfing, some youtube, some download, facebook, twitter, etc):

What load balancing is better? PCC or ECMP?
ECMP seens very easy to configure.
There is some adventage from PCC over ECMP?

Now I’m using a SYSWAN SW88 load balancer, that it’s given a lot of problem (main that almost every day need to be rebooted because begin to go all very slow, and lost access to the web admin interface). This load balancer has several balancing methods, and the better for my setup is the “Byte Tx + RX”.

I’m going to change the SYSWAN for a RB2011iL.

Regards

2

From wiki for ECMP:

Known Issues
DNS issues

ISP specific DNS servers might have custom configuration that treats specific requests from ISP’s network differently than requests from other network. So in case connection is made via other gateway those sites will not be accessible.

To avoid that we suggest to use 3rd-party (public) DNS servers, and in case you need ISP specific recourse, create static DNS entry and policy route that traffic to specific gateway.
Routing table flushing

Every time when something triggers flush of the routing table and ECMP cache is flushed. Connections will be assigned to gateways once again and may or may not be on the same gateway.(in case of 2 gateways there are 50% chance that traffic will start to flow via other gateway).


If you have fully routed network (clients address can be routed via all available gateway), change of the gateway will have no ill effect, but in case you use masquerade, change of the gateway will result in change of the packet’s source address and connection will be dropped.


Routing table flush can be caused by 2 things:

  1. routing table change (dynamic routing protocol update, user manual changes)

  2. every 10 minutes routing table is flushed for security reasons (to avoid possible DoS attacks)

So even if you do not have any changes of routing table, connections may jump to other gateway every 10 minutes

So i would try with PCC