Poor throughput on Balance One Core

Product Discussion Peplink Balance
1

I’m toying with the idea of deploying a Balance One on a gigabit fiber connection. Prior to doing that, I decided to test an existing Balance One (core) that I have. Throughput tests were surprisingly slow given the 600 Mpbs rating.

Here are my results:

228 Mbps at best with the Macbook Pro and Mini on separate VLAN’s (to test routing, firewall)
220 Mpbs at best from LAN > WAN, WAN > LAN using the Mini on the WAN port and the Macbook Pro in a LAN port.
400 Mbps at best using two Windows machines in a similar setup.

I can get 960 Mbps+ directly connecting two machines together with a patch cable (used as a baseline prior to testing) and if connecting to the Peplink using only switching (both devices on same VLAN).

I ran my tests using iPerf3 defaults including window size. After poor results, I changed from the default MTU of 1440 to 1500, but no change. I disabled IPS but the results were actually slightly slower. Several devices were connected during testing (including 2 managed AP One mini’s), but they were sitting idle. I verified that tests devices negotiated a 1 gigabit connection. Max CPU usage during the test was 71%. It tends to run around 10% when nothing is happening.

My Balance One is on 7.1.0s026 build 3483. I have 12 outbound firewall rules, 8 internal rules. I have no port forwarding enabled. IPS is enabled. L2TP with IPSec is enabled (for remote access only, single user). I am also using it to manage two AP One Mini’s.

I used iPerf to test because the Internet connection for the Balance One is only 100 Mbps not gigabit (though I can pull 200 Mbps).

I may trying resetting to factory and disconnecting all devices this weekend and re-running the tests just to see what happens. Nonetheless, it would seem that with the other connected devices being essentially idle at the time of testing that the throughput tests shouldn’t be impacted that much.

I am aware of the problem from several years ago with Mac products, which lead to the “downgrade” of throughput to 600 Mbps for the Balance One. I’d love to be getting that!

Any advice is appreciated!

2

So I reset the Balance One to factory defaults. I repeated the tests and they were pretty much identical. I then downgraded to 6.3.3 and repeated the tests - no change.

The best throughput I could get was in the 230’s using iPerf3 defaults. I did run some tests using UDP instead of TCP (which iPerf defaults to) and got in the 700’s. That’s pretty good, but I don’t think that using UDP to test is very “real world” given that most Internet and LAN communication that matters is TCP.

I dunno. Maybe my tests or assumptions are flawed somehow. I don’t know the testing methodology Peplink uses to rate throughput on the Balance One and if it’s a UDP test, then I’m getting that.

Any input from the Peplink team or those with more Peplink experience than me would be greatly appreciated!

3

You should be able to achieve the 600 Mbps, however if the WAN activation license is activated the router throughput will be reduced to 400 Mbps. I would recommend opening a support ticket here to investigate the issue.

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