Hi all,
I've been doing some rules cleanup and such on my home Untangle, and thought it was finally time to give the Bandwidth Control app a whirl. As my background is more on the admin/security side than network shaping and flow, I figured I should review the wiki before jumping right in. As I make my way through the wiki and FAQ, I have a few questions.
First, I see the most important setting is the WAN bandwidth rates. I know what we pay for likely isn't what the actual speed is, so I followed the recommendation to do some tests during off-peak time. This ended up taking me down a rabbit hole, as the first couple of results came back in the neighborhood of:
Ping: 11 - 13 ms
Download: 403 - 501 Mbps
Upload: 40 - 41 Mbps
I was perturbed, because that's about half the speed we pay for. On the bright side, it's a chance to play around some more! I set up a rule to bypass my desktop, and ran the tests again. Pretty big difference as now it showed:
Ping: 12 ms
Download: 934 Mbps
Upload: 42
I know some loss is to be expected as Untangle does all the nifty things it does, but I didn't expect that. When running the test normally (not bypassed), CPU Load never exceeded 1.25 with a little over 40% memory used. Untangle is installed on an SSD, and I added an Intel server 10/100/1000 NIC to avoid any "on-board NIC" chokepoints.
So... back up the rabbit hole, should I use the "real" bandwidth rate of 400-500 Mbps as the base for the 95-100% calculation of WAN bandwidth as that's what I'm seeing on the interior network when Untangle is doing it's thing, or 900+ Mbps, as that's what Untangle will see (I presume) on it's external interface?
Additionally, is there anything I should be looking at to see about reducing that bottleneck?
Thanks, and happy weekend!