Gargoyle Forum

I'm running NetEqualizer in a 262-room hotel setting right now.

I just deployed a Gargoyle on TP-Link 1043ND to a bar/restaurant with 12Mbit and 40 concurrent users. Not so many users; loads are under control. Circuit is infrequently maxed out. Processor loads negligible.

At a 262-room hotel though, they max out their 15Mbit much of the time. Even with individual user Connection Limits set at 40. This is with NetEq Lite, which keeps priority traffic humming smoothly. But its processor loads have been an issue.

Question: How many users are you handling with your Gargoyle? How many megabit? What kind of processor loads are you seeing? Who is using Gargoyle for multi-tenant applications, and how big are we talking?
Who's got over 100 users and maxing out 25 megabit or more?

Interestingly, the sort of "net abuse" we see at hotel is not high connection-count torrent traffic, typically hundreds of UDP connections. Rather, it's two or three connections per user of high-rate HTTP TCP traffic. Rapidshare and the like.

Note: such "network hog" activity is actually just modern entertainment choice for a hotel guest. They know the Internet has more interesting viewing fodder than cable TV as well as we do. So not all of this "network hogging" is a bad thing for paying guests.

So really, setting HTTP as a priority class will "prioritize" these type of "hog" downloads. Equality will be ensured through the division of class capacity. Does that provide enough fairness for your users? Still I am mostly interested in Who is running the Mother of All Gargoyle Deployments?

I would suggest that the TP-Link 1043ND is a consumer device and not designed for that kind of load.

ubnt RSpro might be a better router?

Appreciate that reply...

After a lot of testing last night I determined that the Lite can easily equalize up to 50Mbit; processor loads are fine.

The issue was also running NTOP reporting constantly in the background. This is 3 times as taxing as the equalization itself. So we just don't run NTOP constantly - use it as needed.

So no worries with NetEq. I just like to keep my eye on what is possible with the consumer-grade gear and see what it can really do.

My testing shows that the TPLine-1043ND can handle 25mbps so I predict it will do fine.

I just had an interesting thought...

it's possible to deploy the Gargoyle as the router and QOS device, and then also deploy the NetEqualizer as a network reporting tool.

The trick would be to turn off the Equalizing process and turn on the NTOP reporting to get the very detailed reports of exact speed per user.

Gargoyle has such reports as well, just in a different format. I wonder how the pie chart will look with 100 users.

The major difference here and caveat is the lack of individual connection limits within Gargoyle. I'm running torrents right now and have 634 connections open from this laptop alone. I've seen single-client connection counts of well over 1,000.

And we have a connections limit of 4096. With the P2P checker in NetEq we have identified as many as two P2P users and two game hosters active at one time with the 262-room hotel. If we had five P2P users, that could take the connection count over 4096. So that might be the limitation. And once the limit is hit, any user can be denied extra connections, not just those running P2P. That's the advantage of having individual connection limits. We keep them at 20 up, 20 down for the current hotel deployment and actually haven't gotten any complaints about it.

For the record each connection takes about 300 bytes. So if you increased your conntrack setting from 4096->10000 your memory requirement would go to around 3 Megs. Probably not a big deal for a 32Meg router.

I am running Gargoyle now for a bar/resto with up to 40 users.

Ran it for a few nights at a large venue with 18Mbit and 40 users, including tech types pushing as much as they could laptop -> iPad via WiFi and updating Google drive etc.

Saw decent processor utilization of 15% or so on WR1043ND.

Planning on another WR for 12-room 5-star hotel with 16 APs just serving as a core router / qos for a few months.