CakeQOS CakeQoS Jitter

[SilentStorm]

Hey everyone,

Question regarding jitter. I'm using CakeQoS at the moment with ack-filter on download and upload. Queue priority is diffserv4 as that seems to have been working best for me, although I'm still experimenting. Router is Asus Rog GT AC2900. ISP speeds are 500/20 but I've set them as 400/15 in the QoS settings for CakeQoS.

I'm currently pinging 8.8.8.8

When it comes to jitter, is it normal for it to vary like this? This is all new to me, so I'm curious as to whether this is normal behavior or not.

 

[L&LD]

Yes, that is the very definition of jitter.

An abrupt and unwanted variation of one or more signal characteristics.

 

[SilentStorm]

Yes, that is the very definition of jitter.

Thanks

 

[Morris]

Start by removing ack-filter and diffserv4. Cake is about automatedly addressing bandwidth demanding applications allowing lower demand real time apps to get out an interface as quickly as possible. diffserv4 is not taking advantage of the automation and requires something to classify the traffic and mark the packets. Unless you implemented something to mark the packets it's not happening.

500/20 is concerning. If you exceed the 20Mb the the solutions are reducing demand or upgrading. A better starting point for the 20 side is 18. You don't have much bandwidth to allocate. Try pinging your up stream router. If the pings don't fluctuate a lot, your not overloading the link. Then put a load on it and see what happens. This is what you can tune. If your ISP or other upstream link is the cause there is nothing you can do.

Start with the defaults, they work great.

Good luck,

Morris

 

[dave14305]

Start by removing ack-filter

500/20 is concerning. If you exceed the 20Mb the the solutions are reducing demand or upgrading. A better starting point for the 20 side is 18. You don't have much bandwidth to allocate.

Given the asymmetrical bandwidth, don’t you think ack-filter on the upload would be advantageous?

 

[Morris]

No, acks are tiny. If there running you out of bandwidth the link is oversubscribed. Also, TCP window management should suppress acks when streaming though that's a should as there can be pore stack implementations. I've seen issues in other areas though the rotate window is so important it's likely done correctly on any major OS.

 

[dave14305]

No, acks are tiny. If there running you out of bandwidth the link is oversubscribed.

Sure they’re tiny, but when download is 25x upload, removing redundant packets from the outbound queue should have at least minor benefit under heavy download load.

 

[SilentStorm]

Start by removing ack-filter and diffserv4. Cake is about automatedly addressing bandwidth demanding applications allowing lower demand real time apps to get out an interface as quickly as possible. diffserv4 is not taking advantage of the automation and requires something to classify the traffic and mark the packets. Unless you implemented something to mark the packets it's not happening.

500/20 is concerning. If you exceed the 20Mb the the solutions are reducing demand or upgrading. A better starting point for the 20 side is 18. You don't have much bandwidth to allocate. Try pinging your up stream router. If the pings don't fluctuate a lot, your not overloading the link. Then put a load on it and see what happens. This is what you can tune. If your ISP or other upstream link is the cause there is nothing you can do.

Start with the defaults, they work great.

Good luck,

Morris

Thanks for your response... I was told by several others that ack-filter on the upload may be beneficial. I guess I can experiment both ways and I'll see what happens. I will also go ahead and switch to besteffort


How would I know if I exceed the 20mb on the upload side? Excuse my lack of knowledge in this field. In terms of speeds, I generally have no problem hitting 20 mbps on the upload. The maximum my ISP officers is 30mb upload, but it would require me to upgrade to a 1000/30 package, and I live in Canada. Packages here are ridiculously expensive. Although they are rolling out Fibre to the home here soon (Rogers Canada.)

I will give 18 a try. How would I go about finding what my upstream router is? Again... apologies for my lack of knowledge here.

Thanks again.

 

[Morris]

The only applications that I'm aware of that will see any benefit from removing ack would be keyboarding and that was back in the days of 9.6Kb Internet trunks. It probably will not do any harm to leave it, yet I'm a firm believer in using defaults unless there is a good reason not to. He can test both ways once tuned if he is not overloading the upload link.

I just tried pinging Google DNS as he was and I'm seeing 5ms of jitter on an A+ link. He has 10 to 15ms, not as good yet not horrible. For most applications there is not a concern.

 

[SilentStorm]

The only applications that I'm aware of that will see any benefit from removing ack would be keyboarding and that was back in the days of 9.6Kb Internet trunks. It probably will not do any harm to leave it, yet I'm a firm believer in using defaults unless there is a good reason not to. He can test both ways once tuned if he is not overloading the upload link.

I just tried pinging Google DNS as he was and I'm seeing 5ms of jitter on an A+ link. He has 10 to 15ms, not as good yet not horrible. For most applications there is not a concern.

Will do.

How can I ping my upstream router by the way? Not sure how to find it. This is all new to me.

Thanks again for your help thus far.

 

[Morris]

Thanks for your response... I was told by several others that ack-filter on the upload may be beneficial. I guess I can experiment both ways and I'll see what happens. I will also go ahead and switch to besteffort


How would I know if I exceed the 20mb on the upload side? Excuse my lack of knowledge in this field. In terms of speeds, I generally have no problem hitting 20 mbps on the upload. The maximum my ISP officers is 30mb upload, but it would require me to upgrade to a 1000/30 package, and I live in Canada. Packages here are ridiculously expensive. Although they are rolling out Fibre to the home here soon (Rogers Canada.)

I will give 18 a try. How would I go about finding what my upstream router is? Again... apologies for my lack of knowledge here.

Thanks again.

One of the few things that bugs me about the Asus routers is that they don't show link utilization in bits per second as they use bytes. Multiply the bytes per second by 8 to get bits per second.

To see the IP of the upstream router, When the "Network Map" tab on the left is highlighted, click the "Primary WAN:" button on the top. All the way to the right and most of the way down the "Gateway: is listed and that's the IP of the upstream router.

One of the things that throws people off with Cake is that you don't need to tweak much to have it work great. We are used to things that you need to tweak so we feel the need.

Good luck,

Morris

 

[SilentStorm]

One of the few things that bugs me about the Asus routers is that they don't show link utilization in bits per second as they use bytes. Multiply the bytes per second by 8 to get bits per second.

To see the IP of the upstream router, When the "Network Map" tab on the left is highlighted, click the "Primary WAN:" button on the top. All the way to the right and most of the way down the "Gateway: is listed and that's the IP of the upstream router.

One of the things that throws people off with Cake is that you don't need to tweak much to have it work great. We are used to things that you need to tweak so we feel the need.

Good luck,

Morris

Thanks so much.

I've just set that as the IP address that conmon addon will ping. I'll give it a day or two and I'll share back any results.

Appreciate your help once again.


As a quick follow up, initial testing with conmon shows this.

Ping test result

Ping 0.917 ms - Jitter - 0.278 ms - Line Quality 100.000 %

Which is very good I'd assume. The gateway IP was 10.0.0.1

Should I use anything other than conmon to test this?

 

[SilentStorm]

One of the few things that bugs me about the Asus routers is that they don't show link utilization in bits per second as they use bytes. Multiply the bytes per second by 8 to get bits per second.

To see the IP of the upstream router, When the "Network Map" tab on the left is highlighted, click the "Primary WAN:" button on the top. All the way to the right and most of the way down the "Gateway: is listed and that's the IP of the upstream router.

One of the things that throws people off with Cake is that you don't need to tweak much to have it work great. We are used to things that you need to tweak so we feel the need.

Good luck,

Morris

Here's what the numbers look like so far. I've let it ping 10.0.0.1 all night every 10 minutes and it's still pinging it.

 

[Morris]

View attachment 30891


Here's what the numbers look like so far. I've let it ping 10.0.0.1 all night every 10 minutes and it's still pinging it.

This is looking good. Time to run a buffer bloat test. You can use one of the automated ones or upload a big file and at the same time ping the upstream router. If the automated test is not great do the later as that's the real test. Going across the internet for one of these automated tests can be a problem if an intermediate link is congested.

Good luck,

Morris

 

[SilentStorm]

This is looking good. Time to run a buffer bloat test. You can use one of the automated ones or upload a big file and at the same time ping the upstream router. If the automated test is not great do the later as that's the real test. Going across the internet for one of these automated tests can be a problem if an intermediate link is congested.

Good luck,

Morris

Thank you so much for your help.

I changed my IP address to ping my DNS server (trying to see what happens.) The line quality then became horrible. Is this normal? My current DNS server is from my ISP (Rogers Canada).

Changed back to pinging 8.8.8.8 and and everything was fine. 100% line quality. Could this be what is causing all the jitter?

 

[Morris]

Thank you so much for your help.

I changed my IP address to ping my DNS server (trying to see what happens.) The line quality then became horrible. Is this normal? My current DNS server is from my ISP (Rogers Canada).

View attachment 30900


Changed back to pinging 8.8.8.8 and and everything was fine. 100% line quality. Could this be what is causing all the jitter?

That kind of ping to the ISP DNS would slow down your web browsing making it choppy as it paints. I suggest you get your DNS from a public source. Google DNS will give you decent response with IP's 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. You might want to use one of the ones that provides security like opendns. There are also ones that block adds besides hostile sites. The merlin code provides some in the DNS filter section.

That is not what was causing your jitter. It might have been your setup or there could have been a temporary condition upstream from you. Once you deal with DNS, you should have a much nicer experience.

Morris

 

[SilentStorm]

That kind of ping to the ISP DNS would slow down your web browsing making it choppy as it paints. I suggest you get your DNS from a public source. Google DNS will give you decent response with IP's 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. You might want to use one of the ones that provides security like opendns. There are also ones that block adds besides hostile sites. The merlin code provides some in the DNS filter section.

That is not what was causing your jitter. It might have been your setup or there could have been a temporary condition upstream from you. Once you deal with DNS, you should have a much nicer experience.

Morris

Will give this a try. Thanks!

I think someone mentioned DNSBenchmark for me, so I'll give that a try tomorrow.

Again, I appreciate your help! I think my ISP may be having issues which is what's causing the jitter. Just spoke to a friend of mine who's also on Rogers, about a 10 minute drive from me. He did a speedtest and it also showed quite a bit of jitter. The good news is, I went back to the basics in CakeQoS and I'm consistently receiving A-A+ on bufferbloat. I think like you said, we're so used to installing something and immediately configuring it, but that isn't necessary for CakeQoS.

Appreciate your help once again.

 

[SilentStorm]

That kind of ping to the ISP DNS would slow down your web browsing making it choppy as it paints. I suggest you get your DNS from a public source. Google DNS will give you decent response with IP's 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. You might want to use one of the ones that provides security like opendns. There are also ones that block adds besides hostile sites. The merlin code provides some in the DNS filter section.

That is not what was causing your jitter. It might have been your setup or there could have been a temporary condition upstream from you. Once you deal with DNS, you should have a much nicer experience.

Morris

Last question for you.. so my current setup is a bit odd. I have my ISP's XB6 gateway, which is not in bridge mode, and unfortunately due to my current set up with the locations and everything, I am unable to put it in bridge mode until further notice. The Asus ROG GT AC2900 is connected to the Xb6 gateway. In order to obtain OPEN NAT, I put the router into DMZ and I have UPnP enabled on the router. No trouble joining games or anything.

I can confirm the jitter is NOT from this set up as if I plug an ethernet cable from the gateway to my computer, I get jitters that are way worse, anywhere from 5 ms up to 70 ms. The router has really cut down on the issue.

On my XB6, I'm unable to change my DNS server. ISP doesn't allow it, so I'm using what my ISP gave me. On the router, I changed my DNS servers to OpenDNS servers as when I did a DNSBenchmark, those were the top DNS's for me.

Is this fine in terms of DNS servers? Am I still communicating with the ISP DNS servers or?

 

[Morris]

Last question for you.. so my current setup is a bit odd. I have my ISP's XB6 gateway, which is not in bridge mode, and unfortunately due to my current set up with the locations and everything, I am unable to put it in bridge mode until further notice. The Asus ROG GT AC2900 is connected to the Xb6 gateway. In order to obtain OPEN NAT, I put the router into DMZ and I have UPnP enabled on the router. No trouble joining games or anything.

I can confirm the jitter is NOT from this set up as if I plug an ethernet cable from the gateway to my computer, I get jitters that are way worse, anywhere from 5 ms up to 70 ms. The router has really cut down on the issue.

On my XB6, I'm unable to change my DNS server. ISP doesn't allow it, so I'm using what my ISP gave me. On the router, I changed my DNS servers to OpenDNS servers as when I did a DNSBenchmark, those were the top DNS's for me.

Is this fine in terms of DNS servers? Am I still communicating with the ISP DNS servers or?

The way your are setup is fine. If you set DNS on your Asus Router to opendns or on your workstation, then you will be using opendns and getting all the benefits. You Asus router sees the XB6 as it's next hop router which probably has a gig link so you are not going to overload that. The interface of concern is the one of the XB6 to the ISP's router. If you are happy with jitter in synthetic tests or to 8.8.8.8 then you are fine. If you want to test further you can get on the XB6 and see it's default gateway that's the one you want to test to. Another way to find it is on your Asus router lower left corner "Network Tools" tab. Then top left tab "Network Analysis" select Method "Traceroute: and trace to any outside host for example www.google.com
The first hop listed will be the XB6, the next one might be *** which is ok. Just use the first one that lists and test to it. The timings you see next to the address are pings.

It sounds like you are well on the way to a much better experience

Morris

 

[SilentStorm]

The way your are setup is fine. If you set DNS on your Asus Router to opendns or on your workstation, then you will be using opendns and getting all the benefits. You Asus router sees the XB6 as it's next hop router which probably has a gig link so you are not going to overload that. The interface of concern is the one of the XB6 to the ISP's router. If you are happy with jitter in synthetic tests or to 8.8.8.8 then you are fine. If you want to test further you can get on the XB6 and see it's default gateway that's the one you want to test to. Another way to find it is on your Asus router lower left corner "Network Tools" tab. Then top left tab "Network Analysis" select Method "Traceroute: and trace to any outside host for example www.google.com
The first hop listed will be the XB6, the next one might be *** which is ok. Just use the first one that lists and test to it. The timings you see next to the address are pings.

It sounds like you are well on the way to a much better experience

Morris

Sounds good. I'll try the traceroute later today and then I'll start pinging that and I'll provide an update.

Thanks again for your help.