QOS causes wired to have very low download bandwidth

[zeldinski]

I am not sure whats going on but i am using 380.62_1 on Asus RT-AC68u and have upload set traditional Qos to 7 Mbps and download set to 70 Mbps. Which seems to work fine on wireless devices, but on my wired pc which i have set to highest priority i get only 6 Mbps of download and upload regardless of load on the system.

If I turn off qos the wired pc gets 80 Mbps download. If I use wifi card on the pc i also get the full bandwidth up to the qos limit.

Does anyone know what might be going on here?

 

[RMerlin]

Traditionnal QoS has been broken for a long time, and no word as to if/when Asus will fix it.

 

[zeldinski]

Traditionnal QoS has been broken for a long time, and no word as to if/when Asus will fix it.

I see ok thanks for that information as i had no idea. Does adaptive still work ?

 

[RMerlin]

I see ok thanks for that information as i had no idea. Does adaptive still work ?

Yes.

 

[HarryH3]

I have a single wired HTPC on my LAN that we rarely use to access the internet. I noticed the other night that it could only download at 5 Mbps. Tried changing cables, ports on the switch, plugging directly into router, etc. with no joy. All of my wireless devices could download at full ISP speed. After quite a bit of messing about with the router, I discovered that ASUS somehow managed to get the Upload and Download Bandwidth values reversed, but only for the hardwired devices. Wireless works as expected, but wired works the opposite. Reverse the up/down numbers and the wired side flies, but wireless slows down. Seems like that should be fairly easy for someone at ASUS to fix.

Switching to Adaptive works as expected, on both wired and wireless.

 

[RMerlin]

Seems like that should be fairly easy for someone at ASUS to fix.

It's not as simple as that. The values aren't backward, it's the way the data flow is handled internally (probably within Broadcom's proprietary code) that's the problem.

 

[snoozeroo]

I came to the same conclusion about the values being backwards, which is how Google led me here. This is awfully suspicious, and something is just straight-up transposed somewhere.

I have an advertised 50/10mb connection (tests at about 62/12) from Comcast. I had a Steam download that was TRASHING my network over a wired connection and went hunting for the issue. Had adaptive QOS turned on, but it clearly was not working. Turned on traditional and started tweaking values, but found that by download was capping at exactly my set upload speed. Each time I would change the user-defined priorities, I could watch the Bandwidth Monitor shoot up to 62, then settle back to exactly what I had set BACKWARDS percentage-wise. Right now I have it set manually to 50 Upload and 10 Download with "Low" priority set to catch large transfers (>512K) at 40% bandwidth. It is hitting EXACTLY 20.0Mb consistently. I built a little chart to figure out the pieces of this puzzle mathematically, and it may not be as simple as "it's backwards", but something certainly is.

This looks an awful lot like a smoking gun -- I used percent values that would be easy to spot proportional to my up/down max. I set my Upload and Download Max backwards -- Upload: 50; Download 10. This is absolutely wrong and the opposite of what was set when I sat down tonight (and every night prior).

In my test I changed ONLY the Upload - Low - Maximum Bandwidth Limit because that the priority my file transfer was triggering:

Each time I changed the Low max, I got exactly the (incorrect) result I predicted. I now realize that this has been dogging me (all of us) for YEARS. Has my affection for ASUSWRT been misplaced?

I am going to run this bassackwards configuration for a few days and see what I get.

 

[snoozeroo]

Quick update. Adaptive QOS has never worked well for me when my network is under load, especially VOIP.

I realize how completely wrong this is, but it's working on wired and wireless and I am unable to swamp my network. If I run speed tests or downloads on various devices, they all seem to get a proportional slice of the bandwidth with other clients (including OBI) still operating normally. So the disappointingly silly configuration I have in effect right now on my 50/10 cable WAN is:

Traditional QOS with Up/Down of 100/100.

Priority Min/Max   Current
Highest  50%/60%  50~60 Mb/s
High     40%/50%  40~50 Mb/s
Medium   30%/50%  30~50 Mb/s
Low      20%/50%  20~50 Mb/s
Lowest   10%/50%  10~50 Mb/s

I have my two OBI MAC addresses set to Highest along with DNS, Time, and NTP.
Web Surfing is High, File Transfer >512K is Medium, e-mail is low, and Crashplan is set to the lowest. I didn't explicitly set streaming video (Roku) or anything else, and so far everything is happier than ever.

As much as I have enjoyed my ASUS routers, and Merlin's invaluable enhancements, this is probably my last ASUS router (Netgear?). I was a Tomato fan for a very long time, but I'm going to have to research the next big thing. Like so many other things now, I just want it to work. I love a good hack, but like my phone, or my car, or my TV, I just want it to do its job so I can worry about more interesting things.

 

[snoozeroo]

Update: definitely leaving my config as above for now. Consistently testing like so... Can't seem to do anything to affect/constrain the upload speed (since I'm using those parms to control the download), but as long as the clients get a decent fraction of the available bandwidth, I don't care.

Ordered a used Netgear R6400 last night just to see the difference in my ASUS experience.

Good luck all.

 

[snoozeroo]

I swear... back to Adaptive QOS. The router has locked up hard and reset three times since making these changes. When the rest of the family is asleep maybe I'll try the basic/minimal config, and build up from there. I just hate this because I have about 25 static IPs that I have to re-enter.

Eric, I don't know if you are willing to defend ASUS, but I take to heart your other thread about the frequency and magnitude of updates decreasing. It was a good run, but damn...

 

[Zirescu]

Use John's nvrambackup tool to backup your values and restore.

 

[snoozeroo]

Ok, here's the update. I swapped my AC87U for the N66U that I was using as an AP. Flashed the latest Tomato Toastman firmware onto it and configured to be as basic a gateway as possible with most of the QOS defaults left as is. For the first time ever, I just tested with straight As on DSLReports:

This is not necessarily an ideal that I am chasing, but it is a strong indicator for my expected experience online. My stability and performance over the last 24 hours has been excellent. Seems a waste to demote my AC87U to a lowly access point, but it also seems very stable in this role and due to the central location seems to have lifted the performance of all wifi clients that tend to be closer to that one. For reference, my QOS settings on my 60/12 Comcast cable connection are set as follows:

I know I'm not following the prescription for 15-30% less, but I am throttling pretty much everything well under my max speed to prevent my connection from ever getting swamped. I get very consistent results even when running downloads, VOIP, streaming, etc. Super stable and no complaints from the family. Thanks for all the help on this.

 

[snoozeroo]

Still loving my new setup... no complaints from the family, and I'm a big fan of Tomato (Toastman version).



Don't be afraid to brick your routers. I've thought I did several times... always was able to flash some minimal non-ASUS firmware like DD-WRT or OpenWRT as a bridge to Tomato. Happy to provide help to anyone hating their life with less configurable firmware. Good luck!