[PLUG] OT: Dual WAN routers?

Matt Alexander m at phxlinux.org
Tue Mar 30 16:57:02 UTC 2004


On Tue, 30 Mar 2004, Steven Raymond wrote:

> One other concern about outbound "packet" load balancing.  Potentially the
> packets could be taking wildly divergent paths if sent to two different
> providers and arrive at different times.  When they arrive at the
> destination, it seems packet reordering may occur.  Would any bandwidth be
> wasted by TCP receiving out-of-order packets and requesting
> retransmission?  Reordering wouldn't be an issue if instead some sort of
> flow-based load balancing were used instead of per-packet.  But then you
> would not get any higher throughput than any single one of your
> connections.

>From what I understand, once a computer establishes a connection to a
remote host, all traffic for that session goes over the same Internet
connection.  If computer A is saturating the first Internet connection
then these routers should detect that and send new connections from
Computer B over the second Internet connection.  So you never get the
speed of both 'net connections combined.







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