IPCop traffic shapping does work

So over the weekend I got RoadRunner Business service to go along with my DSL. The idea is that if my DSL goes out again I'll have a secondary connection with the cable. The only requirement was that I had to have a static IP. OK so I ordered a 2.5M/768k business class service .

Since I'd now have 2 connections to the net I needed 2 routers/firewalls since IPCop doesn't support dual WANs. No problem, I just installed VMWare server on my firewall box an old AMD Duron 950Mhz computer with 385M of ram. Definitely not a power house. After loading IPCop into a VM I restored the backup from my original DSL configured box. Then I simply cloned the VM and renamed it ipcop-rr. Starting up the DSL vm and getting back on the Internet was a snap. Then I turned my attention to the VM for the new connection. I changed the IPs andwent to test it out....



Oh Oh! That's horrible! What's going. I tried hooking a laptop directly up to the cable modem and speeds were WAY faster. I thought it might be the whimpy server I was running the vm on so I set up a faster machine and just loaded up the single vm for the cable connections. Speeds weren't any better. What was going on?????

Then it dawned on me. I had copied the DSL image and several months ago I had turned on traffic shaping. A few clicks later and my suspension was true. I had traffic shaping turned on and it was for DSL speeds. Hence the poor performance. After turning off Traffic Shaping I ran the speed test again...



Now we're talking! That's more like it. Just for comparison I ran the same speed test on my DSL connection with Traffic Shaping turned off. Yikes!!!!



I'm supposed to be getting 3M/384k on the DSL. As the graph shows I'm not getting the bandwidth I'm paying for on DSL and I'm getting really good bandwidth on Cable. I think I'll make the Cable my primary connection and DSL my secondary.