QoS not working at all

[Mitch2025]

I am having a very frustrating issue with QoS. I am running the most recent version of Merlins FW (378.51) on a N66U. It does not seem that QoS is working at all. I want to set it up so my NAS downloads are at the lowest priority. I set my DL speed to 30mbit and upload to 5mbit (I have 35up and 6down total) in the QoS settings and QoS turned on. I added my NAS into the rules with lowest priority. However, it seems that no matter what I set the bandwidth limit to in the priorities list, it downloads at my full connection speed of 35mbit even though I have 30mbit set in the QoS setup tab. I'll even set the lowest priority to 5% yet my NAS will still download at 35mbit. I have tried everything I can think of. I am coming over from DD-WRT which QoS worked flawlessly but I got tired of the wireless getting less and less stable as time went on.

Does anyone have any ideas? I have the protocol set to Any for my nas QoS rule and have tried previous versions of the FW with no luck. Is there a setting I missed maybe?

 

[john9527]

QoS on Asuswrt works differently than DD-WRT. Asuswrt will always provide full bandwidth to a connection unless something with a higher priority starts requesting bandwidth. You won't see your NAS bandwidth change until another app starts running with a higher priority.

 

[Mitch2025]

QoS on Asuswrt works differently than DD-WRT. Asuswrt will always provide full bandwidth to a connection unless something with a higher priority starts requesting bandwidth. You won't see your NAS bandwidth change until another app starts running with a higher priority.

I thought I mentioned it in my first post but it doesn't limit it at all. I have every other device on my network set to highest priority except my NAS which is lowest. However, no matter what, my NAS will download at my connections max. Everything else that tries to use the connection just dies because of it. I get 1000+ms pings and websites will not load.

 

[L&LD]

What is your NAS downloading? From a website / internet location? Or on the local LAN?

 

[Mitch2025]

It downloads from usenet. I did some more testing and set my pc as lowest priority with max bandwidth set to 1.5mbit and started a download. It went max speed even when I tried to watch Netflix on my xbox one which I set to highest priority. I could not load Netflix at all and the download on my pc never slowed down. I tried a torrent and http download.

 

[TonyH]

It downloads from usenet. I did some more testing and set my pc as lowest priority with max bandwidth set to 1.5mbit and started a download. It went max speed even when I tried to watch Netflix on my xbox one which I set to highest priority. I could not load Netflix at all and the download on my pc never slowed down. I tried a torrent and http download.

Hi,
QOS uses some cpu time. Is your cpu very busy? My Netgear R7500 has dynamic QoS and I just enabled it when all the client devices are active and busy. Seems to work OK.

 

[Mitch2025]

Hi,
QOS uses some cpu time. Is your cpu very busy? My Netgear R7500 has dynamic QoS and I just enabled it when all the client devices are active and busy. Seems to work OK.

The cpu is hardly being hit at all. I've seen it spike to 40-50% at times but is mostly around the 5% mark.

 

[fulcsa]

Mitch2025,

I have the same problem on my AC56U. So you are not alone with this type of issue.

 

[john9527]

With no other ideas on deck....can you try this as a test and see if there is any change...
On the LAN/Switch Control tab, Disable NAT Acceleration and reboot.

 

[Nullity]

If you want to resort to SSH/command-line control of your router, the possibilities are virtually limitless. I personally switched to BSD (OpenBSD/FreeBSD/pfSense) as my router simply because the "tc" (Linux) command was poorly documented and even when it was documented it was virtually impossible to understand.

Once I switched to pfSense I was able to implement HFSC and it's awesomely incomprehensible capabilities.


Whatever route you choose, just know, properly implemented QoS is not a "point and click" venture. It has taken me months to understand HFSC and it's decoupled delay and bandwidth allocation using non-linear service curves (lol wtf). If QoS is simple, you are either implementing it wrong or your current implementation is virtually unneeded.



Disregard my above ramble...

Apparently, the current Asus QoS has no ingress control. That is the current situation.

Edit: Asus/Merlin firmware does include IMQ functionality (iirc), so ingress rate limiting is possible, just not implemented. I am trying to work on a fix for this to be implemented into Merlin's firmware...

 

[Nullity]

Ugg, disregard my whole previous post... it is uselessly complicated.



Prioritizing incoming traffic is practically impossible, disregarding rare circumstances.

Think of it like postal mail. You can decide when to send your mail, but you cannot choose the date when your recipient will send the response.

You can prioritize your outgoing traffic, but the resultant affect on incoming traffic is not guaranteed.


One common alternative is to limit a certain type of traffic to an arbitrary bitrate (60% of total download speed, for example), leaving the unallocated throughput available for "prioritized" downloads. If delay is a concern, you must limit incoming and outgoing rates below your limits as to avoid ISP buffering. This is where Asus/Merlin firmware currently fall short (limiting incoming)... though, the capabilities are there.

 

[Mitch2025]

With no other ideas on deck....can you try this as a test and see if there is any change...
On the LAN/Switch Control tab, Disable NAT Acceleration and reboot.

Was already disabled.

One common alternative is to limit a certain type of traffic to an arbitrary bitrate (60% of total download speed, for example), leaving the unallocated throughput available for "prioritized" downloads. If delay is a concern, you must limit incoming and outgoing rates below your limits as to avoid ISP buffering. This is where Asus/Merlin firmware currently fall short (limiting incoming)... though, the capabilities are there.

I've already tried limiting it. I set my NAS to lowest priority and set the lowest priority profile to 1.5mbit as a test. My NAS will still download at full speed no matter what. I have every single device set to highest priority except the NAS but the QoS will not work and nothing can access the internet when the NAS has a download in progress. If the QoS feature was working, it should at least do SOMETHING to the download speed of the NAS when it's set to Lowest and a device set to Highest tries to get online but the download speed doesn't even flinch.

 

[bbunge]

After reading these posts I resolved to try QOS on my N66R. Turned it on and hit Apply and watched the progress bar. Suddenly, my family began to complain of lost connections on the 5G band. Since I was using that WIFI and lost the connection as well I had to quickly boot a wired PC to turn the QOS back off. Will have to wait for a time when the women are gone to try it again!!!

 

[RMerlin]

After reading these posts I resolved to try QOS on my N66R. Turned it on and hit Apply and watched the progress bar. Suddenly, my family began to complain of lost connections on the 5G band. Since I was using that WIFI and lost the connection as well I had to quickly boot a wired PC to turn the QOS back off. Will have to wait for a time when the women are gone to try it again!!!

Enabling QoS will cause your router to reboot, so this is perfectly normal for wifi to go down for 2 minutes.

 

[Nullity]

I've already tried limiting it. I set my NAS to lowest priority and set the lowest priority profile to 1.5mbit as a test. My NAS will still download at full speed no matter what. I have every single device set to highest priority except the NAS but the QoS will not work and nothing can access the internet when the NAS has a download in progress. If the QoS feature was working, it should at least do SOMETHING to the download speed of the NAS when it's set to Lowest and a device set to Highest tries to get online but the download speed doesn't even flinch.

Yeah, if you have set a bitrate limit it should not be able to download faster than your configured 1.5Mbit. Others have complained about this exact problem. I am assuming it is some GUI/scripting bug, because IMQ functionality (ingress limiting) is included with Merlin's firmware (iirc).

 

[RMerlin]

Yeah, if you have set a bitrate limit it should not be able to download faster than your configured 1.5Mbit. Others have complained about this exact problem. I am assuming it is some GUI/scripting bug, because IMQ functionality (ingress limiting) is included with Merlin's firmware (iirc).

IMQ is not available on the ARM platform.

 

[Nullity]

IMQ is not available on the ARM platform.

Ah, that is good to know.


Does ARM support IFB (Intermediate Functional Block), the successor to IMQ?

 

[noric]

I haven't tried 378.51 fw, but I've tried 378.50 and 376.49 and I found out that QoS doesn't work for me too. Bandwidth limiting (http://192.168.1.1/Advanced_QOSUserPrio_Content.asp) actually works, but the prioritization (http://192.168.1.1/Advanced_QOSUserRules_Content.asp) doesn't work.
I then reverted to 374.40, in which QoS works as expected.

 

[GregS]

Just adding that I have the same problem on an Arm router (RT-AC68). No combination of settings appear to limit download speed which causes ping times to shoot up and other internet use to suffer.