Hello, quick question about the RB/493AH board. Is there a max number of “clients”? (IE unique IP addresses) Or is it more of a “what your doing with the router determines how many max ‘clients’ you can have”?
Right now we’re going to be doing load balancing from 4 DSL lines for roughly 40-50 clients right now (but will be expanding) and be running DHCP from the RouterBoard
thanks!
only resources are the limitation. if you won’t use hundreds of simple queues (but some smarter approach) you will be able to connect hundreds of users.
Ahh, well im trying to mimic the function of 2 linksys RV082’s, but with 4 WAN connections. so when you say hundreds, are we talking about ~150-250 or ~300-400? (i doubt we’ll have more clients that will fit in a class C range, just want to make sure we have a good idea when/if we’ll start running in to problems)
Thanks
the number of clients doesn’t matter, it’s all about throughput. See here how much Mbps/PPS you can push: http://www.routerboard.com/pdf/routerboard_performance_tests.pdf
Once you start adding rules that inspect packets, the CPU has more work to do and the max throughput is lower.
This means that you can have, say, 3000 idle clients with no issues, but you could have 30 power users that would put heavy load on the system. And then those two numbers would be different if you would have no Queues/Firewall rules vs if you would have 100 Firewall fules/Queues.
The big question is - what will you do on the router, and what kind of clients you will have?
We’re running a small Wireless ISP, we’re doing throttling from the radio side, so the 493AH would be doing DHCP for the clients, and it would be doing some sort of load balancing (both-addresses-and-ports, as that seems to be the nearest to how i want it to work) and (right now) 4 PPPoE clients (for our DSL lines). no firewall.
as for clients, we have mostly web surfers that just check email and facebook/myspace, we have 1 or 2 people who work from home w/ a vpn to thier main office.