[RT-AC87U] Adaptive-QoS doesn't do jack?

[RamGuy]

Greetings,

I have just retired my Windows Server 2012 R2 DHCP / RRAS / NAT solution and moved it all to my RT-AC87U so I wanted to try the Adaptive-QoS as I've heard good things about. Sadly it doesn't seem to do jack on my network? I have a 94/94 mbit connection so I decided to configure the QoS with 90/90 mbit to have 4mbit overhead.

But upon trashing the bandwidth on my desktop it's not getting throttled or balanced at all? I'm using the whole 94 mbit download bandwidth without the router doing anything about it. Websurfing, YouTube, basically everything else on the network is pretty much useless as I'm trashing the bandwidth from my desktop and still the QoS does not seem to do anything?

I tried to set my computer to lowest priority, but still nothing. Gaming got the highest priority but it's still impossible to game on the network while I trash the bandwidth like this.


Isn't the whole point of the QoS to avoid situations like this?

 

[RMerlin]

It's working for me. Here's an example, based on my typical QoS test. My connection is a 30 Mbps cable.

1) Started downloading an Ubuntu torrent, gave him some time to gain speed. It hit 3.2 MB/s, while connected to multiple peers at the same time:

2) I started running a web-based speedtest. The speedtest reached 28 Mbps (don't mind the 17 Mbps shown in the middle, I caught the screenshot right as the handle was dropping back toward 0 before starting the upload test, the test result is shown a bit above, highlighted), and the torrent dropped to a few hundred KB/s.

3) Once speedtest ended, torrent went back to beyond 3 MB/s.

This was showing how web traffic was properly prioritized over torrent data (considered to be bulk data).

Keep in mind that Adaptive QoS's results is dependent on the router's ability to identify the traffic type. Encrypted traffic will fall into the General category, which cannot be classified properly.

 

[RamGuy]

How does one disable the Adaptive QoS afterwards? I have disabled the Smart QoS option but I'm still only seeing CTF hardware acceleration and not FA. I can't seem to figure out how to get the FA acceleration back on even though I have disabled everything I can in the QoS options.

 

[CiscoX]

How does one disable the Adaptive QoS afterwards? I have disabled the Smart QoS option but I'm still only seeing CTF hardware acceleration and not FA. I can't seem to figure out how to get the FA acceleration back on even though I have disabled everything I can in the QoS options.

Hi, not sure if this work. But I think I was reading here about disable the Spanning-Tree Protocol. LAN -----> Switch Control

In my case just turn off "Spanning-Tree Protocol" and FA was on again.

 

[L&LD]

With everything disabled, have you rebooted the router (via the gui) to see if FA became enabled again?

If it still seems disabled, I would do a hard power off (pull the power plug) after verifying that the router is not using any special modes.

 

[sfx2000]

Adaptive QOS is basically WAN<->LAN traffic shaping, as it works on the router code segments...

Local LAN/WLAN clients - you're running on the local switch, and the UI stuff (see above) doesn't matter, as the switch is a dumb/un-managed switch inside the router... that switch will honor tags, but it doesn't do any kind of prioritization outside of the QoS offered by 802.3... and IEEE isn't traffic aware, it needs to be upper layer where the apps provide the tags.

OSI Layer Cake...

 

[RamGuy]

With everything disabled, have you rebooted the router (via the gui) to see if FA became enabled again?

If it still seems disabled, I would do a hard power off (pull the power plug) after verifying that the router is not using any special modes.

Didn't work, but I will try disabling Spanning-Tree Protocol and see if I get FA back then. After Merlins post I decided to give QoS another go but I'm getting the same results. When I start downloading from the web using Internet Download Manager it eats up my 94 mbit download speeds completely making web-surfing, gaming and whatnot pretty much useless until it's finished. I haven't tested with torrents yet, but I tend to simply configure the built-in speed throttling within the torrent client so it will never go above 85 mbit during the hours we are actually using our network for anything else.

I guess it might have something to do with the router not being able to specify the traffic, but still "others" is prioritized way lower compared to things like gaming (top), websurfing and video streaming and still all these things become useless while my desktop keeps downloading things from the web using Internet Download Manager, and when game clients like Steam, Origin, UPlay, Battle.Net etc starts downloading large game clients. All these things are able to eat up all my download bandwidth making everything else on the network sluggish.


The second time I around I decided to set my upload and download speeds within the QoS GUI to 85 mbit (instead of 90 mbit like I did the last time) in order to see if that might change things. But even though the limit is set to about 10 mbit lower than my actual throughput / bandwidth it still doesn't seem to do anything.

I do notice that I'm also able to give various clients "Highest", "High", "Medium", "Low", "Lowest" and "Empty" under the Bandwidth Monitor section of the GUI. I'm not entirely sure how these values work and how they do affect QoS? From what I understand I'm still able to give clients various "ranks" even with QoS disabled entirely so I'm not entire sure what these values are supposed to offer? I tried setting my desktop to "lowest" but it didn't seem to do anything with the bandwidth situation and I'm not sure how it could as with QoS disable there is no way for the Bandwidth Monitors to know what my actual total bandwidth so how could it start prioritizing anything?



EDIT:

In comparison, before when I ran DHCP, DNS, NAT, RRAS etc from my Windows Server 2012 R2 local server and simply used the RT-AC87U as a access point I did not have any trouble with the network getting sluggish during heavy downloads like I' am currently using the RT-AC87U.

I'm not sure why that is. I did not try to configure any kind of QoS on the Windows Server installation, I don't believe such a thing even exists? It might simply be that the network engine within Windows Server 2012 R2 is somewhat smarter and more capable and is scaling things automatically in order for the network to not stall completely when a client tries to utilise the entire bandwidth?

 

[RamGuy]

Disabling Spanning-Tree Protocol did not work, I'm still only seeing CTF-only after disabling QoS.

 

[RamGuy]

I can't seem to figure how to get CTF+FA back after enabling adaptive QoS. Simply disabling it does not seem to do the trick. I also tried to disabling all the Trend Micro "Ai Protecion" settings, DNS filtering settings, jumbo frames, port forwarding and what not.. I'm basically back to running default settings expect WiFi settings and my reserved DHCP IP-address for local clients and it's still showing only CTF, not CTF+FA.

Might seem like I have to clear the NVRAM and do a complete factory reset in order to get it back. But I guess saving and reloading my settings will get me right back to where I' am and I don't want to bother with setting all my DHCP reservations a second time so I guess I'm out of luck..

 

[RamGuy]

I'm able to get CTF+FA up and running using ssh and pushing nvram set ctf_fa_mode=1 using Putty. But it keeps getting disabled on reboot.

 

[RMerlin]

I'm able to get CTF+FA up and running using ssh and pushing nvram set ctf_fa_mode=1 using Putty. But it keeps getting disabled on reboot.

A lot of different situations will cause FA to be disabled:

https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin/blob/master/release/src/router/rc/init.c#L5005

 

[tbrock47]

Old post I know, but relevant to my current investigations.

Keep in mind that Adaptive QoS's results is dependent on the router's ability to identify the traffic type. Encrypted traffic will fall into the General category, which cannot be classified properly.

How are you verifying what category your traffic is being classified as? I don't want to assume my VoIP traffic and my Gaming traffic are falling into the correct categories. I want to know they are being classified correctly so I'm not causing myself more problems by enabling QoS in the first place. Is there a way to monitor the traffic in real time and see the categories assigned?

 

[RMerlin]

Old post I know, but relevant to my current investigations.


How are you verifying what category your traffic is being classified as? I don't want to assume my VoIP traffic and my Gaming traffic are falling into the correct categories. I want to know they are being classified correctly so I'm not causing myself more problems by enabling QoS in the first place. Is there a way to monitor the traffic in real time and see the categories assigned?

You cannot see the QoS categories, only what it recognizes and what it doesn't, by enabling Apps analysis on the Adaptive Bandwith page.

 

[tbrock47]

So there is no real way to make sure that VUDU or Netflix traffic is actually being dropped into the "Video and Audio Streaming" category? I can see the "VUDU" traffic, but I just have to trust ASUS QoS algorithms work how they are supposed to?

And you mentioned encrypted traffic gets lumped into a "General" category. Is that the "Other" category that is at the bottom of the list by default? I have a tunneled VPN device which I use for work, that also has an IP phone connected to one of my network ports, and the apps analysis is unable to read that traffic. I gave the entire IP the highest priority to circumvent that. I assume that was the correct step?

 

[tbrock47]

Device priorities are evaluated before app category priority right?

 

[RMerlin]

Device priorities are evaluated before app category priority right?

No idea. The whole engine is closed source.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[tbrock47]

Well if anyone is curious, it looks like Call of Duty Black Ops 3 traffic is being put into the "General" category, which I assume is linked to the "Other" app priority. I played some online multiplayer and watched the app classifications in the analyzer, and there were only two apps running, Xbox and General. Xbox has zero activity while General was holding steady with traffic. Definitely not the outcome you would want gaming, assuming "General" = "Other". And I think, by default, other is at the bottom of the list.