Dual WAN Load Balance or Fallback?

[Kashif Tasneem]

Hi guys. I have 2 internet connections. Primary Internet connection is 50 Mbps while secondary is 20 Mbps. I am confused whether to enable load balance or fallback in Dual Wan. I would love to enable Load balance but it disables AI Protection, QoS, Traffic Analyzer and Bandwidth Monitor. My main concern is AI Protection. What should I do?

 

[L&LD]

Test all possible working solutions and pick the one with the least compromises for you.

 

[coxhaus]

The Cisco RV340 router allows you to load balance by bandwidth.

 

[StephaneM]

When I was using Dual WAN ( 50 Mbps + 8 Mbps) I used Load Balance with rules so that it never load balance (load balance was at the time unacceptable as it dropped some connections), this way you can use both connections at the same time. Later I used Fallback but it never worked correctly and required often manual intervention to restore internet connections (with load balance it was less often the case).

Also I noticed that my RT-AC68U was worse with dual wan than my current AX11000.

Now I don't use dual wan at all.

Also in my opinion AI protection is not so useful for me, trafic analyzer, bandwidth monitor are useful though when you need them, just as QOS (AI protection, Trafic Analyzer were putting my AC68 to its knee, so it does use plenty of resources)

My advice would be to use load balance as it's the most flexible when you use it with rules, but be check first that it doesn't break anything (like browsing a secure web site...)

 

[sputnikk]

dual wan load balancing shouldn't break web browsing in any way shape or form. The only time load balancing decisions are made is upon the initiation of a netflow. Once a path is established, its always going to use the same WAN endpoint until the stream is complete.

When you visit a webpage, you spin up hundreds of netflows for every http connection you make to fetch a resource on that page.

With a ratio of 3:1 on the load balancing config page, loosely put, every 3rd http connection will go out your secondary WAN.

The only possible websites that would have a problem with this are ones that go an extra mile to verify you only come from one ip source, perhaps even whitelisting you. I have yet to run into one. HTTP servers shouldn't care.
You are liable to change IPs walking around on your mobile phone and browsing a page over 3g/4g. You're not suddenly signed out as a result.
Dial-up/PPPs are regularly configured as an IP pool so your IP can change at any time. In most cases, only when you reconnect - but not all.
Corporate networks often do NAT as an IP pool, so you're REALLY subject to be put behind almost any given public IP the company owns per http connection - load balanced or not. (ie: going to somewhere like http // ifconfig.me would show a new ip upon every refresh)

TLDR: If you were experiencing web browsing problems - it wasn't a direct result of having load balancing enabled.

 

[StephaneM]

Unfortunately at that time it was the dual Wan load balancing that was not working correctly as it was balancing during the same "session" (for me a session is during a period of time two hosts that are exchanging : This is what I was used to setup on my load balancers for web sites especially for SSL support)

So I don't know how exactly it was messed up, but as soon as I uses load balancing web browsing was a pain, once every other page or resource was not loading. Whereas no issue with load balancing off (either using rules or turning it off, or using failover)

I do agree with you with how Http Servers shouldn't care (well some can use tricks to maintain user session) so I guess it was a routing issue within the router (the response from the server is discarded because the router fail to map it correctly, exactly like on a Windows PC when you have two NIC but only one default gateway and you can't ensure that a request coming from NIC A will be responded on NIC A because the default gateway is on NIC B)

 

[sputnikk]

I hear you on the latter.

Linux avoids the problem by having the ability to assign route tables and do selective routing.

 

[dosborne]

@Kashif Tasneem you could leave them as distinct gateways and set your clients to use one or the other. For example, put iot and other devices on the slower gateway and streaming devices on the faster one.