5. Understanding the dashboard

The Simulator page's throughput readout and the BNG dashboard's downstream graph both read from the same VPP counter, so they should always agree within one polling interval. If they diverge by more than ~10%, investigate — either the poll interval alignment is off or something is throttling one path.

Expect a per-second downstream rate in the mid hundreds of Mbps to low gigabits for a default 50-subscriber run at 50 Mbps offered per sub. The "realistic" profile downloads full-speed when the origin can serve, so the aggregate is bounded by whichever comes first: the sum of per-sub caps, the box's kernel/veth throughput, or the origin server's serving capacity. The rate is naturally noisy at the second-scale; over any 30-second window the average settles down to a steady value.

The traffic pattern intentionally overlaps two burst loops. In VPP-counter terms this means most of the wire is always in use; you should not see the 0-Mbps dropouts that earlier CPESIM releases had.