Report on Meshoween 2021 network test

Note - this report is written from a Southern California perspective. Depending on your location, as they say YMMV!

During the test the node count on the linked networks locally rose to around 1,090.  N2MH's N2MH-Hub saw 1428, most likely a record for an AREDN network.

Observations:

As we hoped, network storms never appeared from our West Coast point of view, and none have been reported to date.  Network traffic was not substantially higher than normal. Using KN6PLV's Mesh Monitor, messages per second were averaging about 600 before the test.  During the test it hovered closer to 700. Most of the increase in traffic was due to OLSR routing broadcasts, which each node has to handle.

As we expected, older devices struggled. Many wound up with a load significantly greater than 1 (which is a full load for a single-CPU device like these), indicating their CPUs were struggling to keep up with their pending processes.  Ssh'ing into a few of them and running top showed that with node counts around 1,000, loads of around 4-5 were seen.  

Things we didn't expect:

While the slower nodes struggled with displaying UI pages, they were usually still able to pass traffic.  But occasionally that older hardware bogged down so much that it couldn't.  Perhaps some effort should be made to prioritize traffic handling...