[SOLVED] ISP in Bridgemode -> Switch with QoS ->Wireless accesspoint (router)

[Kidkong]

I am having trouble with inconsistent ping aka bufferbloat as there are many devices connected to the network at all times.



I've been looking into QoS and figured I could probably use my Netgear S8000 networking switch to manage packets while gaming. As the only wired device to the network is my pc, its connected to the "gaming" port on the switch. All other devices are connected wirelessly to my netgear router thats connected to the "other" port on the switch. Further the switch is connected to the ISP router. With this setup the bufferbloat persists as if I directly connected my pc to the ISP router. I was thinking maybe I could put the ISP router into bridge mode but with no luck as apparently it requires some functionality only a router has.



What would be the best setup for optimal bufferbloat in this cenario? Also, Is the ISP Router messing up my packets after they are sorted in the switch, or do I put it in bridge mode? If so, how do I let the switch assign ip's?



Im sorry if this was a scriblly mess, but Im not really understanding my own situation, hence me asking for help. Thanks in advance!

-Marcus

 

[bill001g]

Another device that they slap "gamer" on and people are foolish enough to think it really does anything special.

Even a $20 8 port gigabit switch can run all ports at 1gbit up and 1gbit down all at the same time. How can you possibly get any form of delay if every port can run at maximum speed. There will never be a data queue unless you are overloading a gigabit port and that port will never be your internet since nobody has 1gbit upload.

First why do you think you have bufferbloat. The testing sites find bufferbloat on every link even someone that has a 10g link it would say has bufferbloat. It intentionally overloads the connection and of course data is going to be buffered.

You never will see bufferbloat unless you are overloading your internet connection. If you have a connection say larger than 100mbps it is rather hard to overload the connection and if you never overload the connection you never have bufferbloat.

In any case that switch I just laugh at since it really has no useful QoS ability.

You are going to need a router that has the ability to run a fairly advanced form of QoS. There are some that have special setting to make it easier to configure bufferbloat but it is not common. It is not some magic though someone is not going to get the bandwidth they want.

If you are actually overloading your internet connection it might be easier to just talk to the other users and ask them to set limits on their downloads or maybe not watch hidef video.

 

[SamirD]

In addition to the great post above--what problem are you trying to solve exactly?

 

[Kidkong]

Another device that they slap "gamer" on and people are foolish enough to think it really does anything special.

Even a $20 8 port gigabit switch can run all ports at 1gbit up and 1gbit down all at the same time. How can you possibly get any form of delay if every port can run at maximum speed. There will never be a data queue unless you are overloading a gigabit port and that port will never be your internet since nobody has 1gbit upload.

First why do you think you have bufferbloat. The testing sites find bufferbloat on every link even someone that has a 10g link it would say has bufferbloat. It intentionally overloads the connection and of course data is going to be buffered.

You never will see bufferbloat unless you are overloading your internet connection. If you have a connection say larger than 100mbps it is rather hard to overload the connection and if you never overload the connection you never have bufferbloat.

In any case that switch I just laugh at since it really has no useful QoS ability.

You are going to need a router that has the ability to run a fairly advanced form of QoS. There are some that have special setting to make it easier to configure bufferbloat but it is not common. It is not some magic though someone is not going to get the bandwidth they want.

If you are actually overloading your internet connection it might be easier to just talk to the other users and ask them to set limits on their downloads or maybe not watch hidef video.

Sorry for late reply, but Im having problem gaming with consistent ping. The switch is still within the 30 day return period so I can easily return it.

What setup do you guys recommend? Is it worth putting the ISP router in bridge mode and let the R6700 manage everything including wifi? Or drop the router entirely and run everything directly into the ISP router. Its a Zyxel VMG for reference. Thanks for the replies!

EDIT: Site used for measuring bufferbloat was dslreports. Its mostly +0, +1 or +2ms but frequently spikes from +200 to +999.

 

[bill001g]

Problem is that site will find bufferbloat on any connection. Bufferbloat is actually a good thing which is why ISP do it. It avoids data retransmission which increase the total throughput of the connection. Pretty much only things like online games that have issues.

Main question is do you exceed your bandwidth either up or down.

If your connection is not being over utilized then you do not have a bufferbloat issue and you really have no issue that QoS of any kinds will resolve.

If your connection is being over used your first step should be to try to find what is over using it and try to reduce that with setting in the applications. The best option of course is to buy more bandwidth so all the different applications can get what they need.

In any case without a router that supports a special form of QoS that are variations of SQM you will have to do it manually. How exactly you do this varies a great deal from router to router. Some routers have the ability to guarantee a minimum bandwidth up and down. Others you must limit all other traffic so that there is always unused bandwidth your game can use.

But your first step is to try to see if and why your connection is being over utilized. If you have a large connection over 100mbps your problem maybe something outside your control.

 

[Kidkong]

Problem is that site will find bufferbloat on any connection. Bufferbloat is actually a good thing which is why ISP do it. It avoids data retransmission which increase the total throughput of the connection. Pretty much only things like online games that have issues.

Main question is do you exceed your bandwidth either up or down.

If your connection is not being over utilized then you do not have a bufferbloat issue and you really have no issue that QoS of any kinds will resolve.

If your connection is being over used your first step should be to try to find what is over using it and try to reduce that with setting in the applications. The best option of course is to buy more bandwidth so all the different applications can get what they need.

In any case without a router that supports a special form of QoS that are variations of SQM you will have to do it manually. How exactly you do this varies a great deal from router to router. Some routers have the ability to guarantee a minimum bandwidth up and down. Others you must limit all other traffic so that there is always unused bandwidth your game can use.

But your first step is to try to see if and why your connection is being over utilized. If you have a large connection over 100mbps your problem maybe something outside your control.

I am pretty sure it's not being over utilized as I have 500/500 fiber connection. Are you suggesting there might be a bufferbloat issue, but its not caused by any QoS handling? I am not familiar with the term SQM, but will read about it. I prioritize a stable responsive gaming connection rather than a video stream, and if im not mistaken gaming doesnt even require much bandwith.

Do you have a reliable tool for measuring bufferbloat, since DSLreports is misleading?

 

[bill001g]

First is to understand what bufferbloat really is. When your connection is busy and has no more room for data rather than just discard the data the ISP places it into a queue...ie a memory buffer. If your connection is not busy then the ISP just sends the data immediately. Why would a ISP put data into a buffer when it can just send it.

So when you are not at 100% load your data is never placed into a buffer and can never get bufferbloat.

This is what drives me crazy is gamers see high ping times and chant bufferbloat bufferbloat no matter what the real reason is.

There are other forms of "bufferbloat" . Technically any delays in the path is data being held in a "buffer" if you want to look at it that way.

Lets take a example your ISP is a bunch of idiots they have a 1gbit of bandwidth to some group of houses. They sell everyone 1gbit plans and for simplicity lets says this is gigabit ethernet fiber rather than something like cable or gpon. So your neighbors kid decides to run torrents at maximum rates. So between your house and the switch there is no bufferbloat you get the full 1gbit. Your neighbor also does. Problem is there is only a 1gbit fiber going back to the ISP main network. Your traffic competes with the torrent traffic. Since it all will not fit the ISP puts some of your traffic into buffers while it is sending the torrent traffic.

So you decide to get a fancy router and setup SQM to avoid the bufferbloat. All this does is cut your usage so maybe your netflix runs slower. Your nieghbors kid doesn't care he continues to use up the extra bandwidth you gave up by limiting your netflix traffic and your game still gets ping spikes.

Pretty much if your traffic is not actually causing the problem you can not fix it.

When you have a very fast connection like yours you can not even think to run QoS even if you would need it. Routers use a special hardware acceleration feature that allows traffic to bypass the CPU and the NAT function is done in hardware. When you use QoS or many other feature the traffic must again pass through the cpu and your speed will drop to 250-300mbps and even less on routers with small cpu. You pretty much have to use a PC to use any advanced things when you have a very fast internet connection.

You can run things like pathping or even simple tracert and normal ping commands to try to find the source but unless it is your router causing it you can not fix this. Your ISP generally does not care about ping spikes. They might fix packet loss. They can't actually fix ping spikes that are because of over utilization even if they admit it without spending money to upgrade connections.

 

[Kidkong]

First is to understand what bufferbloat really is. When your connection is busy and has no more room for data rather than just discard the data the ISP places it into a queue...ie a memory buffer. If your connection is not busy then the ISP just sends the data immediately. Why would a ISP put data into a buffer when it can just send it.

So when you are not at 100% load your data is never placed into a buffer and can never get bufferbloat.

This is what drives me crazy is gamers see high ping times and chant bufferbloat bufferbloat no matter what the real reason is.

There are other forms of "bufferbloat" . Technically any delays in the path is data being held in a "buffer" if you want to look at it that way.

Lets take a example your ISP is a bunch of idiots they have a 1gbit of bandwidth to some group of houses. They sell everyone 1gbit plans and for simplicity lets says this is gigabit ethernet fiber rather than something like cable or gpon. So your neighbors kid decides to run torrents at maximum rates. So between your house and the switch there is no bufferbloat you get the full 1gbit. Your neighbor also does. Problem is there is only a 1gbit fiber going back to the ISP main network. Your traffic competes with the torrent traffic. Since it all will not fit the ISP puts some of your traffic into buffers while it is sending the torrent traffic.

So you decide to get a fancy router and setup SQM to avoid the bufferbloat. All this does is cut your usage so maybe your netflix runs slower. Your nieghbors kid doesn't care he continues to use up the extra bandwidth you gave up by limiting your netflix traffic and your game still gets ping spikes.

Pretty much if your traffic is not actually causing the problem you can not fix it.

When you have a very fast connection like yours you can not even think to run QoS even if you would need it. Routers use a special hardware acceleration feature that allows traffic to bypass the CPU and the NAT function is done in hardware. When you use QoS or many other feature the traffic must again pass through the cpu and your speed will drop to 250-300mbps and even less on routers with small cpu. You pretty much have to use a PC to use any advanced things when you have a very fast internet connection.

You can run things like pathping or even simple tracert and normal ping commands to try to find the source but unless it is your router causing it you can not fix this. Your ISP generally does not care about ping spikes. They might fix packet loss. They can't actually fix ping spikes that are because of over utilization even if they admit it without spending money to upgrade connections.

Wow, this is very informative! I should already in my initial question have asked what the source of my problem was before attempting to do anything crazy. Your example with the neighbor thing is something I wasnt aware of. Im gonna try removing the switch and my router and let the ISP router do its thing. Perhaps our neighborhood line or ISP itself is experiencing a slight overload during quarantine times. I will definitely educate myself more in this subject before I try more drastic tinkering.
Finally I thank you for all this information and time spent helping me out

 

[failboat]

Wow, this is very informative! I should already in my initial question have asked what the source of my problem was before attempting to do anything crazy. Your example with the neighbor thing is something I wasnt aware of. Im gonna try removing the switch and my router and let the ISP router do its thing. Perhaps our neighborhood line or ISP itself is experiencing a slight overload during quarantine times. I will definitely educate myself more in this subject before I try more drastic tinkering.
Finally I thank you for all this information and time spent helping me out

For those speeds you shouldn't need any qos. the dsl reports test is not to test bufferbloat its to test if your qos eliminates bufferbloat. only fq_codel or cake can do it very well and any 1W router is going to run at 100Mbs or less typically. so turning it on cripples a connection as fast as yours. If you have a spare pc with two nics you can run ipfire with fq_codel and play with it, but you shouldn't need it. many features on low power routers limit throughput so be careful what you turn on. basic nat is about all they can handle with your speeds.

 

[richb-hanover]

[Sorry to revive an old thread...]

... the dsl reports test is not to test bufferbloat its to test if your qos eliminates bufferbloat...

DSLReports Speedtest simply measures the latency during heavy transfers. You can do the same thing manually by starting a ping to google.com, then starting your favorite speed test site. If the ping times go up during the speed test, something is affecting your latency.

The usual cause is that the router at the bottleneck (usually your connection through your ISP) is buffering more packets than can be sent in a few dozen msec. That's the "bloating of buffers" we're discussing.

If this is still a problem for you, it would be helpful to get numeric results of your test, either a link to the DSLReports Results page or a summary of ping times during the up/down parts of the test.

What can you do? There's advice at What Can I Do About Bufferbloat? That page notes that the sub-US$70 EdgeRouter-X seems to handle ~400mbps while minimizing lag.

For more details, you can read an earlier post that discusses how TCP relies on discarding packets for congestion control, and how the anti-bufferbloat algorithms (going by different names: AQM, fq_codel, cake, even PIE) use those packet drops to prevent large flows (like photo uploads) from harming your interactive traffic. See
https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/latency-issues-bufferbloat.3562469/post-21509861