Please advise on CPU-efficient load balancing approach

RouterOS General
1

Hi,

I’m in process of setting up my home network with two identical incoming links (100Mbps each) from my ISP. ISP gives me two Ethernet links via UTP/RJ45. As expected ISP don’t want to bother with bonding/aggregation. Even for extra money. So I’m trying to set up load balancing of two independent links.

I have two routers - RB750GL and RB943G and can use one of them to “load balance”.

What I’m struggling with is what load balancing approach to choose so I can utilize less powerful RB750GL.

I’ve tried “Bandwidth-based load-balancing” (http://mum.mikrotik.com/presentations/US12/tomas.pdf) and “simple” PCC (https://aacable.wordpress.com/2011/06/04/mikrotik-4-wan-load-balance-pcc-complete-script-by-zaib/). Both are using mangle rules.
PCC distributes load properly between both links . As of “Bandwidth-based”, unfortunately I could not get it running as expected - speed fluctuates a lot like a sin function.
PCC is based on

add chain=prerouting dst-address-type=!local in-interface=Local p er-connection-classifier=both-addresses-and-ports:2/0 action=mark-connection new-connection-mark=WAN1_conn passthrough=yes
add chain=prerouting dst-address-type=!local in-interface=Local per-connection-classifier=both-addresses-and-ports:2/1 action=mark-connection new-connection-mark=WAN2_conn passthrough=yes

BB is based on traffic monitor script that detects high load on 1st link and triggers mangle rule to start new connections on 2nd link.

Both PCC and BB loads RB750GL and RB943G at 100% and I’m not getting expected maximum throughput.

With single link and RB750GL/RB943G I get almost 90Mbps, so I expect that with two links I should be able to get around 170 Mbps.
However, with RB750GL I get max 120 Mbps and with RB943G I get 145Mbps.

I tried to configure my routers with minimum set of firewall etc rules possible.

Can anybody advise load-balancing approach that is more efficient from CPU prospective comparing to described PCC and BB? Does it exist?

2

That’s an interesting thread, as I also use RB951 devices in my network.
I’m not quite sure, but when you use mangle rules, this makes the system process each packet and unfortunatelly RB951 is not the fastest Mikrotik router out there. I guess you’re hitting the hardware limit.
You could try profiling the system while under load with /tool profile

3

I know I hit HW limit for both approaches PCC/BB, but I’m wondering if I can get more thoroughput using some other HW-efficient approach (if it exist).

Anybody? Any advise on 1st post?