QoS or not?

[Reef2009]

Hi, guys

I have two AX88U routers. One as a main router en one as a wired AiMesh node and I'm running latest verstions on both units.
Sinds last month I experience issues on IPTV (NLZiet) and video conferencing (Google Meet en mostly MS Teams).
On both, screen and sound flickers, why I somtime miss content end important imformations in conference calls.
The other conference users also complain about my bad connection.

I tried defaults for Adaptive QoS and Cake. and yesterday I turned QoS completely off and things went smoother
I use default firewall settings and cloudflare DNS without ristrictions. I have use an allways on VPN with killswitch but not on IPTV devices and working devices.

I've these configurations.
One Adaptive QoS:

On Cake:

CakeQoS interacts with spdMerlin. with a more dan acceptable speedrate for an only 100/100Mbit connection.

I also checked CPU usage because QoS uses much CPU I thouth but I cant se any particulars.

Does anyone have suggestions to get a good and stable connection with good conferencing en IPTV performance.
I prefere QoS because 2 little gamers here sometimes use much bandwith.

 

[alba666]

Hmmm, some questions:

1) Wired or Wireless AIMesh?
2) Issue when connected to main or node unit?
3) Were your gamers active or not during issues?

In my experience, I get more stable performance with QoS off. Had a Zoom meeting yesterday with no issues. But I don’t have gamers anymore.

 

[BreakingDad]

Have you tried installing FlexQOS and using fq_codel with it?

It also has pre defined rules for teams.

Also on adaptive, with or without flex, set the upload/download bandwidth manually rather than auto configure to 85-95% of your worst speed test result for optimal results.

These are mine, but I prioritse gaming, you could swap the top two around and move video/audio streaming up.

I get zero spikes while gaming with flex (unless the isp goes crazy)

 

[Reef2009]

Hmmm, some questions:

1) Wired or Wireless AIMesh?
2) Issue when connected to main or node unit?
3) Were your gamers active or not during issues?

In my experience, I get more stable performance with QoS off. Had a Zoom meeting yesterday with no issues. But I don’t have gamers anymore.

1. wired AiMesh
2. both, mostly Node
3. yes and no. In both situations

 

[Reef2009]

Have you tried installing FlexQOS and using fq_codel with it?

It also has pre defined rules for teams.

Also on adaptive, with or without flex, set the upload/download bandwidth manually rather than auto configure to 85-95% of your worst speed test result for optimal results.

View attachment 43684
These are mine, but I prioritse gaming, you could swap the top two around and move video/audio streaming up.

I get zero spikes while gaming with flex (unless the isp goes crazy)

never tried FlexQoS, I'll look for it later today

 

[BreakingDad]

never tried FlexQoS, I'll look for it later today

Yeh I noticed you had Merlin, so it's a simple install from AMTM, and the author provides top support right here on the forums.

FlexQoS - FlexQoS 1.3.2 - Flexible QoS Enhancement Script for Adaptive QoS

FlexQoS Version 1.3.2 - Released 16-Sep-2022 This is just a minor release with an iptables optimization. Nothing exciting or outwardly visible has changed. CHANGED: Split iptables rules into separate upload and download chains to avoid unnecessary rule traversal CHANGED: Tweaked 'debug'...

www.snbforums.com

GitHub - dave14305/FlexQoS: FlexQoS - Flexible QoS Enhancement Script for Adaptive QoS on ASUSWRT-Merlin

FlexQoS - Flexible QoS Enhancement Script for Adaptive QoS on ASUSWRT-Merlin - dave14305/FlexQoS

github.com

 

[Reef2009]

I just installed FlexQoS and set the bandwitdh manual on 85%.
thnx for now, I'll test it next week.

 

[BreakingDad]

I just installed FlexQoS and set the bandwitdh manual on 85%.
thnx for now, I'll test it next week.

play around with the bandwidth in small increments, it can make a massive difference to tweak for best performance. Change it a bit then try a speed test, keep trying until optimal.

 

[Crimliar]

Don't have spdmerlin running during the day. Every time it runs it'll eat all your bandwidth and pretty near kill your connection. Have it set on a custom timer so it only kicks in at night when you are not using the internet!
Love spdmerlin, but using it the way you appear to be is problematic!

 

[Yota]

When you have 100Mbps UL, I don't think you need QoS because it's hard to saturate it in everyday situations, even if you're 4K live, it won't consume more than 60Mbps upload.

You can try disabling QoS for a week and see if it's better or worse. make sure your router's hardware acceleration is enabled after QoS is disabled.

 

[Reef2009]

When you have 100Mbps UL, I don't think you need QoS because it's hard to saturate it in everyday situations, even if you're 4K live, it won't consume more than 60Mbps upload.

You can try disabling QoS for a week and see if it's better or worse. make sure your router's hardware acceleration is enabled after QoS is disabled.

Hi Yota, the reason I use QoS is since Covid19. We needed to work from home and realize a stable connection for conference calling. We had issues with it when the kids came home from school and are multitasking with multiple full HD streams and gaming on two devices.
Conference calls had issues so I experimenten with QoS and had good experiances with it. It's just for a month the quality is bad again. If FlexQoS is failing I'll try to turn it off completely. The other option is to block streaming on the kids devices during working hours

 

[MarkyPancake]

That's strange. When we had a 200 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up service, we never had any issues without QoS with two homeworkers using video conferencing at the same time (usually one on Zoom and the other on Teams), as well as other devices consuming video and audio services and online gaming at the same time. One AC86U serving these devices wirelessly across separate 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz networks.

 

[Yota]

Hi Yota, the reason I use QoS is since Covid19. We needed to work from home and realize a stable connection for conference calling. We had issues with it when the kids came home from school and are multitasking with multiple full HD streams and gaming on two devices.
Conference calls had issues so I experimenten with QoS and had good experiances with it. It's just for a month the quality is bad again. If FlexQoS is failing I'll try to turn it off completely. The other option is to block streaming on the kids devices during working hours

QoS is not a panacea, you have to find out what is really affecting your calls.

There are many possibilities, try checking your traffic analysis records during the call to see if the upload is saturated?

 

[jj22038]

My QoS adventure was ultimately due to Torrent, 10Mbit upload, and video conferencing. Cake QoS helped a lot, doubling the upstream connection, and telling my son "No Torrents", somewhere in there the video conferencing is working fine now.

I looked at the upload graph in the router GUI to see that I was saturated (12 Mbit in use out of 10 possible) before I started spending time and money.

All is not a waste - I ended up with a new router so that I could run Cake.

 

[A Purohit]

Damn kids.

You can also tell them to turn on the throttling in their torrent client... no reason to run that wide-open unless you KNOW there is no one on the network.

I wonder if there's a way you can setup a throttle on the router for their IP address(es)?

 

[jj22038]

He likes a wired connection, so I unplugged him until he complied.

 

[Yota]

I wonder if there's a way you can setup a throttle on the router for their IP address(es)?

Well, although I'm showing signs against QoS here, to achieve bandwidth limiting you have to enable QoS, there is an option on the QoS page called "Bandwidth Limiter" which is based on MAC address not IP address , which means that the bandwidth limit will still be in effect if the IP address changes.

Since it's QoS based, NAT hardware acceleration will fail when enabled, which is not something you want to enable if you have a gigabit network.

 

[capncybo]

Well, although I'm showing signs against QoS here, to achieve bandwidth limiting you have to enable QoS, there is an option on the QoS page called "Bandwidth Limiter" which is based on MAC address not IP address , which means that the bandwidth limit will still be in effect if the IP address changes.

Since it's QoS based, NAT hardware acceleration will fail when enabled, which is not something you want to enable if you have a gigabit network.

Ummm I'm fairly certain one of the main advantages of FlexQoS was to retain hardware acceleration, wasn't it? I mean I have a 300 Plan which allows 330down & about 15up sooo... I use FlexQoS to achieve Max throughput yet Minimize bufferbloat