Network Interface + Bandwidth Accounting

twest

Hello! Can anyone explain the strategy and uses of so many network interfaces? On my hosting servers there's 14 and on the main control panel there's 20. On my cPanel servers there's 2. Guessing it's something to do with management of the containers or maybe clustering?

I'm mostly interested because the network activity being reported in my server monitor is crazy for Enhance servers. I'm getting reports of like 50Mbps transfer inbound and 40Mbps outbound (sustained all day), when it should in reality be more like 1Mbps inbound and 10Mbps outbound.

Interestingly It's just the interface br-8c88c567714f that's really out of whack. If I just look at enp1s0f1 then that looks right what I'd expect (currently showing 500Kbps inbound and 9Mbps out). What is the br-8c88c567714f interface doing and why is it showing so much "inbound traffic"?

Adam

The internal bridge networks are used for container connectivity; Enhance app containers (PHP) and docker. All traffic between containers such as MySQL data, FastCGI, RPCs, internal data transfers, etc will go via these internal network interfaces. The traffic never leaves your server.

You should only monitor your public interface which in this case sounds like it's enp1s0f1.

twest

Adam ah great, thanks for the confirmation. I figured it was something to do with the containers, I'm still learning docker so this is really interesting to see how it works with Enhance. I was running a few network tools in ssh to investigate and couldn't make sense of where the data was being generated from since as far as I could tell all incoming traffic was normal.