Overloading Balance 20?

I seem to keep pegging the CPU load on my Balance 20 in my home network. Especially when I apply changes or have a good bit of internet traffic. I have added a subnet with about 10 virtual servers fairly recently. After it catches up, sometimes up to 10 minutes, it seems to work ok.

  • 2 WAN Circuits (24mbit DSL and 60mbit Cable)
  • I do have a 45 firewall rules set up
  • 8 subnets
  • @40ish connections

Guess my questions is: Am I just expecting too much from a 20? Is this telling me I need to move up to a Balance 1 or something?

Model: Peplink Balance 20
Hardware Revision: 6
Firmware: 8.0.1 build 3658

We had a similar situation a couple of years ago at a customer’s installation … B20 with 2 WANs, controlling 2 APs, two PepVPNs, two subnets, and not nearly so many outbound rules. CPU usage was high and occasionally it would get super flaky. One of the nice folks @ Peplink took a look at via RA and found it was not a CPU problem but rather insufficient memory. We replaced it with a B1 and – poof – no more problems – lower CPU usage, more responsive UI, solid behavior.

What had happened was that the owner liked what the B20 would do and just kept increasing her demands on it. My very strong guess is that you are asking too much of the B20. The B20 is a great box but you are working it awfully hard.

And, BTW, that quite a number of FW rules you have.

2 Likes

Guess I forgot to mention that it is also running 2 AP’s.

On the firewall rules, some paranoia’s run deep. Have my girlfriend on her own subnet and wireless ssid. Don’t think she’s met a Facebook game that she doesn’t want to play. Did want to give her access to a couple network resources however, so I couldn’t just make it an isolated network like I did the guest networks. I try to keep my testbed systems pretty isolated as well.

Ahhh yes. Opinion: The “Facebook problem.” :drooling_face: Nope. That’s not paranoia. Naaaah … I think you have it all figured out. :+1:

I don’t question anything you are doing. But I strongly suspect you really need more hardware to make it work efficiently. The Balance One is the probably next logical step unless you have a couple of very fast WANs.

1 Like