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Question about Load-Balancing

Tags:
  • Internet Service Providers
  • Networking
  • Load Balancing
Last response: in Networking
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October 3, 2014 9:30:29 AM

I was wondering if there is any benefit of load balancing off of a single ISP. Would it help to plug in another Ethernet cable from the single modem into the dual-wan port and run everything as a load balance? I don't have too much knowledge about this stuff but any help is appreciated.

More about : question load balancing

October 3, 2014 9:33:25 AM

load balancing for multiple servers? or are you talking about 1 server with 2 wan port?
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October 3, 2014 9:36:35 AM

It is just one server. It is for a semi-small business.

There are no real servers or anything. We have about 8 computers but have wireless internet set up for a few ipads as well as customers to use. Overall I would say about 50 things are on our network at all times.
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October 3, 2014 9:37:30 AM

Short answer -- NO.

Longer answer: Unless a single ethernet cable is maxed out, which would only happen if your modem had more than 100Mbit service and only had 100Mbit ethernet ports (unlikely, unless you own the modem and upgraded servers but didn't buy a new modem), there is enough bandwidth on the input to your router.
Even if you had a second independent internet source (say 4G cellular), a single client will only be able to use one of those paths. If you had dozens of clients and had load balancing enabled the agregate client throughput should improve.

Do you have the dual WAN setup as failover now?
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October 3, 2014 9:39:47 AM

So right now there is a cable going from the modem to the router. Then from the router to a couple different switches.

I would not be adding a second router or modem, just plugging an additional cable from the modem to the router.

We do have a second router available also if I did want to go from the modem to a second router. I can then take some of the switches off of the first router and plug them into the second to kind of manually load balance things. Would that help?
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October 3, 2014 9:41:59 AM

@kanewolf.

We only have one ISP coming into the building so there is no failover at the moment. We are looking to get a second network in so we can have a customer network and a company network however that is not going to be for a long time.
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Best solution

October 3, 2014 9:42:26 AM

Cracken62 said:
So right now there is a cable going from the modem to the router. Then from the router to a couple different switches.

I would not be adding a second router or modem, just plugging an additional cable from the modem to the router.

We do have a second router available also if I did want to go from the modem to a second router. I can then take some of the switches off of the first router and plug them into the second to kind of manually load balance things. Would that help?


What bandwidth service are you paying for? If it is anything less than 100Mbit, then there is NO POSSIBLE BENEFIT in any more cables.
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October 3, 2014 9:59:14 AM

The only benefit, will be the knowledge gained in working on setting it up.

You are capped at the modem to whatever you are paying for (or by the line...), so the bottleneck 99% of the time, is the isp, not your *connection to the modem/switch*. So if you have 4 1000 mbit ports in the modem, and you have a 40 mbit limit on a 1000mbit WAN port(up and down...for giggles not because you actually have that)...40<1000...40<2000...What ends up happening, is if you split the two lines up, and "load balance" as you call it, it ends up freaking the switch out a bit unless you have the ability to tell it that you are "load balancing", which most(all?) modem/switches do not. It creates overhead both on the computer side, and on the modem/switch side. Realistically you aren't going to notice that overhead because you aren't able to notice it (0.5ms vs 0.7ms for example), but you can quantify it if you had the right tools.

If for some reason you actually have a 1000mbit connection in...Then the above is still true. If your connection is somehow greater then 1000mbit, then yes, having two 1000mbit connection in to your pc would help you (assuming you can get the teaming/load balancing working).

On the other hand, if you are doing this for people on your LAN, then there is the possibility of using more then 1000 mbit at one time. There are a some nuances to this...such as the peak usage of a single pc (assuming it also had 2 nics in teaming er load balancing)...would it be maxed to 1000mbit or 2000mbit downloading from the server, the answer isn't always simple. Depending on the hardware, it may peg out at 1000mbit max per connection, but with two downloads, could hit a peak of 2000mbit. Anyway, this wasn't your question, but...oh well. ;-)

Ultimately this comes out to simple math. If your internet connection > then your Ethernet connection, then yes it makes sense to set up load balancing with a second or more nics, otherwise the bottleneck is the internet connection.

You can* peg out the Ethernet card before pegging out the total throughput of gigabit...but thats not worth getting in to. Unless someone is targeting you for some reason, or you have faulty hardware you don't have anything to worry about...


edit: Oops, sorry when i looked at this i thought there was only 1 response. ><...Also edited a couple things above...
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October 3, 2014 10:13:32 AM

He can't load balance as he only have one wan connection and one server, load balancing is used for environments with multiple wan connections to provide redundancy and/or to spread out incoming requests between multiple servers. If the issue is a slow internet connection for the network it is because the internet connection is only 8mpbs which is not enough for the internal network and then on top of that customers use it. Your best solution in my opinion would be to upgrade the internet connection then possibly use a proxy for content caching which would reduce the outgoing internet request, also if still want to allow customers to use your internet connection setup traffic shaping so they only have a limited amount of bandwidth for use as the majority of the bandwidth should be for your business purposes.
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