Automatic bond tuning

To easily offer optimum performance for a bond, Bonded Internet can automatically test legs and update leg and bond settings with the ideal values for a site. It can even be configured to test a bond when it first comes online, and to automatically set the legs and bond with the ideal settings. This is known as leg and bond tuning. It works by running a series of speed tests on a leg or bond, analyzing the results, and recommending download and upload speeds for each leg and the values of important bond settings.

Automatic tuning requires that legs offer a reasonable level of stability. If the leg or bond has considerable speed variation, as is common with certain types of wireless and mobile broadband legs, testing may fail because the software does not know how low it’s acceptable to set the leg speeds in order to get reasonable stability—only an administrator with knowledge of the bandwidth requirements of the particular site can make that decision. In this case, you can tune the bond manually.

Leg tuning

During a leg tuning job, the leg is removed from the bond. If the bond has only a single leg, this will interrupt customer traffic.

To tune a leg, click the Actions button for the leg, then click “Detect speeds.”

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The tuning job is created and a number of tests are scheduled on the leg. If the leg is offline, the test will wait until the leg comes back online before starting to tune. As soon as a leg gets a test scheduled, a notice is shown beside its icon on the bond details page:

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Bond tuning

During parts of a bond tuning job, customer traffic is interrupted. Take care to run tuning jobs only when it’s acceptable to interrupt the customer’s network service.

As part of bond tuning, all the bond’s active legs are tested in the same way as running a leg tuning job. If any non-failover leg cannot be tuned, the bond tuning job will fail, as it’s not possible to detect ideal bond settings if the legs speeds can’t be determined. If a failover leg cannot be tuned, the bond tuning job can still complete.

To tune a bond, click the bond Actions button, then click “Tune bond settings.”

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This opens a dialog with a number of options for the tuning job, as follows:

Bonded throughput

The minimum acceptable bond throughput as a percentage of the sum of all leg’s speeds. For example, if this value is 85%, the tuning will be considered successful if a bond with 10 Mbps of total download bandwidth and 2 Mbps of upload bandwidth reaches at least 8.5 Mbps upload and 1.7 Mbps upload.

Test stability

The stability level required to consider testing successful. High stability tests require very stable speed results; this achieves the greatest bonding efficiency but may not be suitable for wireless legs. Accepting results with lower stability can reduce the overall efficiency of the bond but allow legs with low stability to be tuned automatically.

Test length

The length of each individual speed test. This can usually be left at the default, 10 seconds, but may need to be increased when tuning cable legs with a 20 or 30 second boost feature.

Schedule

Determines when the tuning is run.

  • Right now: begin the tuning process immediately
  • When all active legs are online: as soon as all active legs are online, begin the tuning process
  • At this time: begin the tuning at the selected time, up to 24 hours in the future

Cancelling a tuning

Bond settings cannot be changed while a bond or leg test is underway. If a bond must be updated before a test is finished, you can cancel a test by clicking the “Cancel tuning” button at the top of the bond details page. You can also cancel a scheduled tuning this way.

Reviewing tuning results

Tuning can take a while—up to 15 or 20 minutes or more depending on the number of legs and the number of tests that need to be run to determine the ideal settings. The user that executes the tuning job is sent an email when the task finishes. When a tuning job is complete, a notice is shown on the top of the bond details page offering a link to the tuning results. This page offers the option to accept the tuning recommendations and adjust leg and bond settings, or to decline the recommendations and keep the current leg or bond settings.

Bond settings cannot be changed while a bond or leg test is underway. If a bond must be updated before a test is finished, you can cancel a test by clicking the “Cancel tuning” button at the top of the bond details page.