Hello all,

I have question about tc HTB traffic shaping. In our network we have two servers which running HTB. Each one of these servers are served about 5200 client's (public IP's). In the rush hours, about 60-70 % clients becames online, the servers cpu load became too high. So the question is what would be better solution, change these two servers with one big server wich have two quad core cpu and 4x1GB NIC's, or add third HTB server and balance users between these three servers, about 3600 users in each server. Each server use HTB hashing tables, and eache client (IP) have two HTB classes.

server1 hardware:
Centos 5.5 x86_64
kernel 2.6.18-194.32.1.el5
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8600 @ 3.33GHz
4 GB ram
2x1GB NIC's

server2 hardware:
Centos 5.5 x86_64
kernel 2.6.18-194.32.1.el5
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8600 @ 3.33GHz
4 GB ram
2x1GB NIC's

thank you.

Not sure why you think traffic shaping has anything to do with your servers getting busy. Traffic shaping deals with preventing bandwidth saturation / bandwidth control so that there is order and fairness in the usage of the network resource. Your problem sounds to be more of a CPU resource issue, which can only be improved by either increasing CPU resource, or limiting client access thus lowering the CPU usage (which I guess isn't what you want). Add another server to the cluster (or are you load balancing?) would be my choice. More nodes, the less chance of constructing a single point of failure.

Good luck.