Multiple PC Online Gaming

[Nighthawk70]

Hi all, new here. A little background, I've been in IT for over 15 years. I'm a developer and have done some, very little, network support. So I know a enough to set everything up at home, but not enough to be good at it. I sure hope i posted this in the right forum category as I figure this is more of a LAN issue than a router specific. Although it could be.. ?? Thats why I'm posting this.

I think, no I know, I'm having issues with something network related. I'd try to label it but again I don't know enough to even diagnose what my problem is. Hence this post asking for help to educate me on what to do etc. I predict what someone might say is to up my ISP bandwidth, but I want to feel confident that doing that will solve my problem before spending more money. I'd rather fix the problem than throw money at something and waste it.

I'll start with the why: In my house there are at times 5 of us playing some form of on-line game. Wether it be first person shooters, minecraft, etc. On a normal day when either myself or one of my kids are playing solo and no one else is using the network it seems fine. It seems as though for fast paced games like first person shooters the problem exponentially worsens as reaction time is essential. I notice that there are times that the latency (if thats the right term) is just awful.

I've tried using port triggers and turning on the base QOS on the router but it almost seemed to make it worse. Maybe it was coincidence but I ended up with 'rubberbanding' in some of the online matches that i was in.

All the computers are wired in via cat 5e cable. Nothing is wireless as I realize the potential for 'lag' increases based on demand. I'm using a new ASUS RT-N66U router. I've experienced better performance from this router from my last.

Where and how do I start to research this? Is there software that I can use on a PC to analyze what is going on? Are there recommended settings or an alternate bios that I should be using on the router? This is where I feel so dumb, I don't know what to do at this point to diagnose what could be potentially going on. I have upgraded to a 3 meg down and a 1 meg up connection about 6 months ago and it seemed to help but not totally remedy the situation.

If you need more info from me let me know, but any help or a point in the right direction would GREATLY be appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[knacky]

I had the exact same problem. I usually play an MMORPG in the evenings and at any given time the wife will be web browsing or watching youtube vids while my two stepkids will either be web browsing or running Netflix upstairs. Web browsing will cause brief bursty downstream traffic while Netflix has a tendency to suck up all available downlink bandwidth when its running. Naturally this didn't bode well for my online gaming which is very latency sensitive.

I have been in IT for over 15 years also, but I am on the "other side of the fence" being a network analyst with a focus on security and risk management. My knowledge of development and coding is virtually nil.

And yes, you are using the term latency in the correct context. Latency is the amount of time for a packet to leave you, reach a remote server and then return to you. Ideally you will want latency to be no more than 50ms for online gaming, although things should still be reasonably playable (in my experience) up to 100ms, or 1/10 of a second.

The solution you'll likely need on your RT-N66U is properly configured QOS and ACK prioritization. QOS can rate-limit traffic and can, among other things, allow for guaranteed bandwidth allocation for certain ports and protocols. ACK prioritization (benzedrine.cx) allows empty TCP ACK packets to be pushed to the front of the egress queue and substantially improves simultaneous upstream/downstream usage scenarios. Incorrectly configured QOS can hurt your network performance more than not using it at all. Add to this that not all QOS uses the same methodology. Some routers QOS schedulers use HTB (wikipedia.org) while others may use HFSC (wikipedia.org). Other routers may support both and let you choose the QOS scheduler yourself. Then there is the option of queuing disciplines with some examples being PRIO, ALTQ and CBQ.

If your RT-N66U firmware is anything like it was for my RT-AC66U, there should be a generic QOS switch in the web GUI you can turn on for "automatic QOS". This should at least give you ACK prioritization. I believe there were also fields where you could manually specify ports and protocols. If you are feeling adventurous you can flash your RT-N66U router with the excellent Asuswrt-Merlin firmware (lostrealm.ca) which is developed and maintained by user RMerlin on this same forum, and provides additional features, bugfixes and optimizations beyond what the Asus stock firmware includes.

As for my situation, I went off the beaten path to find a solution. In my search for a fix, I came across the CeroWRT project (bufferbloat.net).

CeroWRT is a derivative of the popular OpenWRT firmware and is based off the cutting edge Barrier Breaker trunk release. CeroWRT is developed primarily as a research and academic project and is currently only supported on two models of Netgear routers WNDR3700v2 and WNDR3800. One of the many things that make CeroWRT shine is its AQM (Active Queue Management) that uses a HTB scheduler with the FQ_CODEL (bufferbloat.net) queuing discipline. The link will explain it far better than I can here. I was so intrigued by the work being put into CODEL that I went out and bought a Netgear WNDR3800 just to put CeroWRT on it, replacing my RT-AC66U. I lost a little range in the 5Ghz band but gained virtually perfect QOS and traffic management. Now the wife and stepkids can be banging away with youtube and Netflix and my online game latency almost never increases more than 10ms from it's usual 60ms.

 

[jlake]

I assume you have PPPoE DSL?
Is your modem in bridge mode?
How old is your DSL modem? Older DSL modems will contribute more buffer bloat.

A friend of mine is in your shoes with DSL and 3 Mbps down/756 Kbps up.
His solution was to get a 3G/4G LTE Verizon Mifi for gaming only.

I suppose you could explore using a 3G/4G LTE USB dongle on the RT-N66U and using your DSL modem/router for the LAN. But you might need to get another router or AP.

Finding a different ISP might be a better option. Increasing your ISP speed up/down will help reduce buffer bloat as well.

http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/

 

[Nighthawk70]

The solution you'll likely need on your RT-N66U is properly configured QOS and ACK prioritization. QOS can rate-limit traffic and can, among other things, allow for guaranteed bandwidth allocation for certain ports and protocols. ACK prioritization (benzedrine.cx) allows empty TCP ACK packets to be pushed to the front of the egress queue and substantially improves simultaneous upstream/downstream usage scenarios. Incorrectly configured QOS can hurt your network performance more than not using it at all. Add to this that not all QOS uses the same methodology. Some routers QOS schedulers use HTB (wikipedia.org) while others may use HFSC (wikipedia.org). Other routers may support both and let you choose the QOS scheduler yourself. Then there is the option of queuing disciplines with some examples being PRIO, ALTQ and CBQ.

If your RT-N66U firmware is anything like it was for my RT-AC66U, there should be a generic QOS switch in the web GUI you can turn on for "automatic QOS". This should at least give you ACK prioritization. I believe there were also fields where you could manually specify ports and protocols. If you are feeling adventurous you can flash your RT-N66U router with the excellent Asuswrt-Merlin firmware (lostrealm.ca) which is developed and maintained by user RMerlin on this same forum, and provides additional features, bugfixes and optimizations beyond what the Asus stock firmware includes.

Thanks first off very much. I have upgraded to the latest Merlin Asus firmware. Are there they suggestions for setting up the QOS? Currently I play mostly Diablo 3 and Battlefield 4. My kids play anything from Day-Z, Team Fortress, Warframe, BF4, etc. So there is usually a lot of gaming going on.

I am stuck with a kind of wierd situation that i know doesn't help me at all. Currently my ISP (WOW cable) has me stuck with a 'Gateway' that is a combo router and tv DVR. I hate their interface as it's so simplistic and clunky I basically turn everything off on it that I can and use the ASUS as the main router jumped through the gateway. I know my issue will probably end up being something like a double-NAT, which I'm not sure how that would cause latency. But everything works fine, until the traffic gets heavy. Then the latency just takes over and no one has a good night.

Not sure if port triggers would help stuff out or not.

Anything else I can do to tweak the Merlin setup?

Thanks again!

 

[Nighthawk70]

I assume you have PPPoE DSL?
Is your modem in bridge mode?
How old is your DSL modem? Older DSL modems will contribute more buffer bloat.

A friend of mine is in your shoes with DSL and 3 Mbps down/756 Kbps up.
His solution was to get a 3G/4G LTE Verizon Mifi for gaming only.

I suppose you could explore using a 3G/4G LTE USB dongle on the RT-N66U and using your DSL modem/router for the LAN. But you might need to get another router or AP.

Finding a different ISP might be a better option. Increasing your ISP speed up/down will help reduce buffer bloat as well.

http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/

As I posted just recently I have WOW Cable internet 30/3 (which translates to 3 megs down / 1 meg up). I have the router in normal mode just has to jump through the WOW gateway. I know it's not optimal but I'm thinking of calling WOW and asking them if I can use my own cable modem (DOCSIS 3.0 i believe is the correct version) instead of their gateway.

The option of purchasing a separate 3g/4g lte dongle is too expensive for me. I already have an iphone and while the LTE in my area is pretty good, it's shady in my basement where i have my pc. Thanks for the idea tho.

That link to analyze the network is pretty cool thanks for sharing.

 

[sinshiva]

what is your upload bandwidth? not much matters more for gaming than that, nat throughput aside. run voip tests; with my network and 768kbit up dsl, i can run about 5 simultaneous streams and get near flawless performance for each. if one or more of those streams are downstream video, you'd likely need even more upstream throughput for near perfect line quality.

[edit/]

somehow missed the last post. well, i switched to dsl for better gaming performance/latency. i 'downgraded' from 50/10 cable to 10/768kbit dsl and pay less, get better latency and love knowing i have a nearly dedicated line compared to a shared cable trunk being split amongst a heavily bandwidth saturated neighborhood.

in most cases, my latency dropped by ~25%, some greater than 50%. of course, you'll want a fatter pipe for the streaming video, but if you can do it with DSL, i highly recommend it. it's a lot closer to t1 or fiber performance than cable ever will be, for gaming.