[SOLVED] Is there a way to prioritise traffic for specific games?

[MeatSociable]

I'm suffering from high ping especially when the home network is being used for Netflix. I'm wondering if there is a way to prioritise my game's traffic in the router.
The game is World of tanks and it's running on port 6881<-- That's the incoming connection port it has another number underneath it saying "1 - 65535" I can sometimes play the game at 60-80 ping but after a max of two games it shoots up to 500 and when people are watching Netflix it shoots up to 1000+ It's as if after a few minutes it can't handle it anymore and gives up.


I'm connected wirelessly to a router that i have set up to be a wifi extender. The router is connected via ethernet to my home router. I'm connected to that router because i have two bars of signal with the home router vs full bar. Plus when i try and connect to my home router there is no internet.

I've tried to look at the router but i don't know what i'm supposed to look for.

The internet isn't fast but it's the ping that is very frustrating.

Thanks for all your help, even it's just to know that i can't play online games until i move area.

 

[bill001g]

It depends on your router. You can't actually "prioritize" traffic because by the time your router gets involved the ISP has already discarded the game traffic and sent the netflix traffic.

Many routers have no ability to do anything with the download traffic. Those that do it varies greatly between routers. Some routers have the ability to reserve bandwidth for particular IP. Others you would have to instead limit the netflix traffic.

In any event be sure you check with the people running netflix. If you find a way to give you game bandwidth the people running netflix will likely get poor performance. It could stall or pixelate or they may be force to drop the resolution they are watching. This quickly gets into the discussion of whose traffic actually is more important.

In any case try first test on ethernet. If your issues are wifi related QoS will not help. QoS only function on the WAN interface traffic between the router and the end machines both on ethernet and wifi can not be affected using consumer routers.

 

[failboat]

This type of qos is the only effective one at bufferbloat. It's fq_codel or the newer version cake. The ERX in the video runs at up to 100Mbs so if your package is more than that it's not a good option. Other companies have offerings now and you will likely have to buy to get this feature. openwrt runs cake so if you can flash a router with that it's a great option. these use a round robin queue and it buffers the ones using the most internet, eg netflix. so games go through unbuffered. to test you would use dslreports bufferbloat test. There are ways to create buckets of traffic but just using the default setup is the way to go in my opinion. ipfire has a great gui for setting this up and it can handle 1Gbs+. If you're in the 100-250Mbs range this might be a decent option if you really want to tweak it.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-g2P3R84dw

 

[MeatSociable]

This type of qos is the only effective one at bufferbloat. It's fq_codel or the newer version cake. The ERX in the video runs at up to 100Mbs so if your package is more than that it's not a good option. Other companies have offerings now and you will likely have to buy to get this feature. openwrt runs cake so if you can flash a router with that it's a great option. these use a round robin queue and it buffers the ones using the most internet, eg netflix. so games go through unbuffered. to test you would use dslreports bufferbloat test. There are ways to create buckets of traffic but just using the default setup is the way to go in my opinion. ipfire has a great gui for setting this up and it can handle 1Gbs+. If you're in the 100-250Mbs range this might be a decent option if you really want to tweak it.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-g2P3R84dw

Thank you for your reply,

That option seems great but at this moment of time i do not want to spend extra money.

Something i just found was that my ping is only high when gaming otherwise it is actually very good, I've tried multiple speed testers and my ping averages from 10-70ms which would be superb to have when gaming.

Any thoughts on that?

 

[MeatSociable]

It depends on your router. You can't actually "prioritize" traffic because by the time your router gets involved the ISP has already discarded the game traffic and sent the netflix traffic.

Many routers have no ability to do anything with the download traffic. Those that do it varies greatly between routers. Some routers have the ability to reserve bandwidth for particular IP. Others you would have to instead limit the netflix traffic.

In any event be sure you check with the people running netflix. If you find a way to give you game bandwidth the people running netflix will likely get poor performance. It could stall or pixelate or they may be force to drop the resolution they are watching. This quickly gets into the discussion of whose traffic actually is more important.

In any case try first test on ethernet. If your issues are wifi related QoS will not help. QoS only function on the WAN interface traffic between the router and the end machines both on ethernet and wifi can not be affected using consumer routers.

Side note: It's not only affected by Netflix, I think it's just pronounced. Because when i was the only one who was using wifi it still was very high ping.

What do you think?

(And thank you very much for replying so quickly)

 

[bill001g]

Your first step is to try ethenet at least to test. You really have to find out if you have a internet issue that might be helped by QoS or you have a wifi issue. Wifi issues are extremely hard to fix because the fundamental design of wifi error recovery is in direct conflict with what games need to sync the server and the client.

 

[failboat]

Thank you for your reply,

That option seems great but at this moment of time i do not want to spend extra money.

Something i just found was that my ping is only high when gaming otherwise it is actually very good, I've tried multiple speed testers and my ping averages from 10-70ms which would be superb to have when gaming.

Any thoughts on that?

Ping increases come from buffer so it's not going to go up unless you fully utilize your bandwidth. If you do the dslreport bufferbloat test without qos you will see your latency max out. with that qos you can use 90% or so of your bandwidth and ping will stay low on small connections.