QOS on 1gbps network speeds

[Tech9]

I will have to run some test and let you guys know

Most web surfing and streaming fits in 100Mbps speeds. Connect a Fast Ethernet switch (up to 100Mbps) to your router and test bufferbloat with wired to it PC. The slow switch is going to act as hardware bandwidth limiter, no QoS. Let me know if you see any bufferbloat. If you do - the test you use is way off. Remember, you have 800Mbps extra available bandwidth on top.

 

[sbsnb]

I don't trust tests that claim to test bufferbloat because they are sometimes wildly inaccurate. I just start pinging a random place like facebook.com and let that run for a minute to get an idea of the average response time. Then I fire up something that will likely saturate the connection (like a bittorrent download of a new LibreOffice version or something) and watch if/how that affects ping times. Don't do the ping from the same machine doing the downloading.

If your ping times are badly impacted, adjust QoS bandwidth downward. I've seen cable internet with an advertised speed of 500/30 that has regular periods of actually functioning at 50/5. The only way to make QoS work reliably on a connection like that is to set it for something like 45/4.5 even though you're "wasting" 450 Mbps during periods when it's available.

 

[Tech9]

I just start pinging a random place like facebook.com and let that run for a minute to get an idea of the average response time. Then I fire up something that will likely saturate the connection (like a bittorrent download of a new LibreOffice version or something) and watch if/how that affects ping times.

This is exactly my preferred method, I usually ping Google.

 

[L&LD]

And here is an extreme example of when the rule of thumb of 90% of the ISP paid for speeds was ignored for the benefit of the customer.

Wi-Fi Setup 25/2.5 d/u Report

and

[Release] FreshJR Adaptive QOS (Improvements / Custom Rules / and Inner workings)

the install routine didn't recognize my system as Merlin, so I had to answer the "stock or not" question. Is that normal? AC3200 w/ 384.11. What's the output of "uname -o"? That's the only check it does to determine Merlin. It should be "ASUSWRT-Merlin"

www.snbforums.com

 

[sbsnb]

I liken it to stop and go traffic. You can either floor it each time it opens up a bit and then slam on the brakes when it stops, or you can figure the average speed and just go that speed the whole time without having to mash the pedals.

 

[Tech9]

Flooring it each time may give better user experience in web browsing. At least this is what I see happening with Asuswrt Adaptive QoS. With QoS disabled the web pages open faster, as long as someone else is not flooring it with Linux distros in the same time.

 

[sbsnb]

"It works until it doesn't" as the saying goes. Your internet is great until somebody else in the household does something to mess it up. The more users there are the more of a necessity QoS becomes. On my 500 Mbps connection everything would be fine until one of the kids watching Netflix would start complaining about buffering and it turns out the other kid is upstairs downloading a Steam game while she's using Youtube to listen to background music and Facetime with her friends while they play video games.

It also helps to do other things. I had to explain to my daughter that you don't have to watch Youtube in 1080p on your 5-inch phone screen. That saves a lot of bandwidth.

 

[Paliv]

What you recommend to set if I have non symmetrical 1gbs download and 60 mbs upload internet. The upload buffetbloat is about 300 mls or more.
I can't setup QoS for upload side only like OpenWrt.

I’ve wondered about this too. There is no high speed symmetrical internet in my area. Just cable that has high down and low up. We have 1200/35 at our house. Thankfully we don’t do much uploading, but if I turn on Adaptive QoS it cuts the max total down to about 800mbps. Which most services don’t download that fast anyway, but it still is a loss in overall network performance if multiple high speed downloads are going (rare in our house).

 

[sbsnb]

At some point it doesn't matter in any practical sense. Even if you're downloading a 4 GB Linux distro you're talking about the difference between 27 seconds and 40 seconds.

 

[Paliv]

At some point it doesn't matter in any practical sense. Even if you're downloading a 4 GB Linux distro you're talking about the difference between 27 seconds and 40 seconds.

Very true, this is more of an academic curiosity than an imperative (why leave performance on the table unless you have to). I could probably halve my down speed and no one in the house would notice including myself. The bump in speed tier was for faster uploads anyway.

 

[vit5421]

Its all about upload latency for non symmetrical 1gbs internet.
How to limit upload speed only to improve upload bufferbloat?

 

[Paliv]

Its all about upload latency for non symmetrical 1gbs internet.
How to limit upload speed only to improve upload bufferbloat?

Are you actually experiencing latency spikes? I see it if I test for it running a constant ping during a speed test, but I don't think I've ever seen it in actual usage. If I do it's quite transient. The only answer is to use Adaptive QoS and take the hit to your download speeds. I'd be okay with that if it ever became necessary since no service I use hits over 600mbps down anyway, and we don't have a lot of heavy downloaders in the house (...yet, the kids are still small).

 

[Tech9]

It also helps to do other things.

Between me and you only , I use traffic shapers with fd_codel on my firewall. I also use Wi-Fi 5 access points with 2-stream Wi-Fi clients, so no client in real world can steal the entire ISP bandwidth. Possible in theory, if tested at 2AM and 10ft line of sight to the AP.

 

[leerees]

I'm sure most of us are experienced enough to know if we have buffer bloat. But I'd like to add this for anyone new who's been told to enable QOS by default.

To test if you have buffer bloat, run a speed test on the router (or PC connected via ethernet) and run continuous pings on another connected machine. If the pings only increase by 10 - 20ms, you have a very good line that is not affected by buffer bloat. This means gaming will be unaffected by heavy downloading / streaming.

If the increase in latency is fluctuating wildly out of control then you have a buffer bloat issue and will need QOS.

QOS will reduce the performance of your router on a 1Gbps line. Therefore, only enable if you actually have buffer bloat.

Stable increase in latency under load = normal
Wildly fluctuating latency under load = buffer bloat

 

[nickie]

In the past couple of days, I've been playing with QoS (standard asuswrt, not merlin) although I have a 500/100 connection (normally 510+/105). My issue is not with the download but with the upload. My wife and I work mostly from home and use cloud services like dropbox, google drive and one drive. The main issue I detected was when uploading large files, which traditionally uses all the upload bandwidth, and someone is on a conference call either via zoom or teams with these services manifesting some breaks and zoom warning of poor internet connection. As a way of trying to minimize these disruptions I turned on QoS (500/100 max limits) and added these video-conference services the highest priority. Of course, as a consequence, my ac86u now is only able to provide about 400mbps (and not constant download speed), although ul is working well as and as intended.

I realize FlexQoS might do the trick, but I wanted to keep using the official asuswrt firmware. My question is: is there a reason for why the FlexQoS is not implemented in the asus official firmware? To me it seems to be just an algorithm that would use just a few kb of space and might make QoS usable for higher internet speeds (which is something that people will have more in the near future). As it stands, QoS seems to be a feature that seems not to be used at all given the impact in router performance.

 

[dave14305]

My question is: is there a reason for why the FlexQoS is not implemented in the asus official firmware? To me it seems to be just an algorithm that would use just a few kb of space and might make QoS usable for higher internet speeds

The Merlin Addon API is needed to allow for the customization settings and hooks into the firmware framework. A determined person could figure out the essentials of the FlexQoS outputs and find a way to implement the resulting iptables and tc commands to achieve the same thing.

FlexQoS won’t do anything specific for high speed connections more than regular Adaptive QoS will.

 

[nickie]

The Merlin Addon API is needed to allow for the customization settings and hooks into the firmware framework. A determined person could figure out the essentials of the FlexQoS outputs and find a way to implement the resulting iptables and tc commands to achieve the same thing.

FlexQoS won’t do anything specific for high speed connections more than regular Adaptive QoS will.

My issue is not with the upload which is running fine. It's the performance hit on download (less 100mbps) which does not seem to happen when using flexqos...

 

[unsynaps]

I do not think QoS even works well at 1GbE speeds on these routers. Not enough horsepower.
Actually, I think it is because you must shut off acceleration. With that off these routers max around 250MbE

Not to mention kind of pointless if your ISP is as fast as your LAN.

 

[sbsnb]

I do not think QoS even works well at 1GbE speeds on these routers. Not enough horsepower.
Actually, I think it is because you must shut off acceleration. With that off these routers max around 250MbE

AFAIK it is only Cake that disables acceleration.

 

[CriticJay]

there is no Asus router that can handle 1Gbit QoS -

Just an FYI, this is wrong.

I'm surprised no one has called this out yet.

As per the SmallNetBuilder review of the AC86U (perhaps y'all have heard of SNB? They write pretty good reviews of wireless routers ) - even with Adaptive QoS enabled, the AC86U was able to maintain a 1gbps Internet connection. Granted, thiggins probably tested with an asymmetric cable connection**, but that's probably the only time you'd need QoS on a Gigabit home connection. A symmetric fibre Gigabit link shouldn't need QoS IMO.

Anyways, given the experience of the AC86U, it's probably safe to say that all HND-based Asus routers should be able to handle Gigabit speeds with Adaptive QoS enabled.

** = and I personally was able to replicate this on my asymmetric Gigabit cable connection (DOCSIS 3.1; 940mbps/30mbps).
There are no issues with Adaptive QoS enabled + Gigabit download speeds, on my AC86U.