[SOLVED] Uploading causes Bufferbloat. How do I fix it?

[meme3ssar]

When gaming online, a lot of ping spikes happen. A test on dslreports.com shows a lot of bufferbloat while uploading .

My router has a QoS option where I can set uploading bandwidth as well as minimum and maximum upload speeds. What should I set them to? (Upload speed reaches 3 Mbps)

 

[bill001g]

First the testing sites that see bufferbloat are intentionally trying to cause them. It just means your connection has the possibility of getting the problem. That site I think can cause bufferbloat on any connection. It is always funny to see the test results on people complaining about how bad the bufferbloat test results they see and they have a 1gbit up and down connection. When you ask do you actually have problem with your game the answer is no but but but the tool says I have a issue.

Bufferbloat will only happen if your connection is overloaded. The ISP will place data into buffers if there is no room in the transmission to your house rather than discard them. This is actually a very good thing for application because they do not have to re transmit data and it allows them to actually use the full line capacity which many time they can not do on a high latency connection.

Games are pretty much the only exception.

The first step it to try to avoid maxing out your internet connection by using option in application to limit them to rates below your ISP connection. You for example can set steam lower and you can even set rates for cloud backups in your of phones. This is all QoS is really doing but it is actually works much better in the end devices.

There routers that have a special 1 button fix the bufferbloat problem. I am pretty sure it was a selfish gamer that developed this. It assumes all large data streams are evil and all small data streams are good. This might be true if the large data stream is a download but if it is something like netflix then what it does is assume the quality of the netflix stream is less important than the game data. Not always true if the person paying the bill is the netflix user. It can cause very stuttery web surfing on a very small connection on graphic intensive web pages.

You can use normal QoS to get a similar result depending on how advanced it is. Exactly how you do it depends a lot on the router.

The actual lie about QoS is it is not actually QoS. On upload it is but on download what it does is discard data it actually received rather than give it to the end device. The hope is that the error recovery in the software will detect these errors and assume it will then request data a lower rate. Not true for all application, bit torrent will just open more small sessions.

The routers that you can specify a minimum and maximum bandwidth might work but from my testing it seems to still get spikes when the traffic varies a lot. They don't give much information on how they actually implement this. You must set the rates much above and below the actual rates.

Generally what you can do is group all your non game traffic together. Say you have a 10mbps internet connection and you game needs 1mbps. What you would do is limit the non game traffic to say 7mbps which leaves 3mbps for the game. The problem is this bandwidth is locked away even if the game is not using it. The problem is related to to burst of data traffic and the rates be average rates rather than some instant rate.

The real solution of course is buy a bigger internet connection that you can not actually exceed the bandwidth on and then you do not need qos.

 

[meme3ssar]

First the testing sites that see bufferbloat are intentionally trying to cause them. It just means your connection has the possibility of getting the problem. That site I think can cause bufferbloat on any connection. It is always funny to see the test results on people complaining about how bad the bufferbloat test results they see and they have a 1gbit up and down connection. When you ask do you actually have problem with your game the answer is no but but but the tool says I have a issue.

Bufferbloat will only happen if your connection is overloaded. The ISP will place data into buffers if there is no room in the transmission to your house rather than discard them. This is actually a very good thing for application because they do not have to re transmit data and it allows them to actually use the full line capacity which many time they can not do on a high latency connection.

Games are pretty much the only exception.

The first step it to try to avoid maxing out your internet connection by using option in application to limit them to rates below your ISP connection. You for example can set steam lower and you can even set rates for cloud backups in your of phones. This is all QoS is really doing but it is actually works much better in the end devices.

There routers that have a special 1 button fix the bufferbloat problem. I am pretty sure it was a selfish gamer that developed this. It assumes all large data streams are evil and all small data streams are good. This might be true if the large data stream is a download but if it is something like netflix then what it does is assume the quality of the netflix stream is less important than the game data. Not always true if the person paying the bill is the netflix user. It can cause very stuttery web surfing on a very small connection on graphic intensive web pages.

You can use normal QoS to get a similar result depending on how advanced it is. Exactly how you do it depends a lot on the router.

The actual lie about QoS is it is not actually QoS. On upload it is but on download what it does is discard data it actually received rather than give it to the end device. The hope is that the error recovery in the software will detect these errors and assume it will then request data a lower rate. Not true for all application, bit torrent will just open more small sessions.

The routers that you can specify a minimum and maximum bandwidth might work but from my testing it seems to still get spikes when the traffic varies a lot. They don't give much information on how they actually implement this. You must set the rates much above and below the actual rates.

Generally what you can do is group all your non game traffic together. Say you have a 10mbps internet connection and you game needs 1mbps. What you would do is limit the non game traffic to say 7mbps which leaves 3mbps for the game. The problem is this bandwidth is locked away even if the game is not using it. The problem is related to to burst of data traffic and the rates be average rates rather than some instant rate.

The real solution of course is buy a bigger internet connection that you can not actually exceed the bandwidth on and then you do not need qos.

My download speed is 25 Mbps and the strangest thing is that even when I'm the only one using the internet and everyone is asleep at night, I still get these consistent ping spikes when gaming. I check to see any background downloads, none. It's so weird

 

[bill001g]

That tends to be the problem. People run these testing tools and see red and assume it is their issue.

It will require more detailed investigation. I would actually disconnect all the other device and even disable the wifi radios in the router......I will assume you are not using wifi because is a common cause of issues for gamers.

I would run constant actual ping commands to say 8.8.8.8, your router and the first ISP router which generally is hop 2 in a tracert. You want to see if this corresponds to what the game is telling. Many times games lie and blame delays on network when it is something else.

If you have no issues to your router then it gets hard. Delays to the ISP maybe bufferbloat but you need to see if you actually are using 100% of your bandwidth. With a single machine you should be able to watch the network tab of the resource monitor and see what you transmission and receive rates are. It will clearly show if some web page does a large refresh in the background.

The problem maybe outside your control. Could be delay in ISP networks, they also get bufferbloat because too many customers are trying to use their connections. Does little good for you to reduce your usage, just lets the other guys get better performance.

 

[meme3ssar]

That tends to be the problem. People run these testing tools and see red and assume it is their issue.

It will require more detailed investigation. I would actually disconnect all the other device and even disable the wifi radios in the router......I will assume you are not using wifi because is a common cause of issues for gamers.

I would run constant actual ping commands to say 8.8.8.8, your router and the first ISP router which generally is hop 2 in a tracert. You want to see if this corresponds to what the game is telling. Many times games lie and blame delays on network when it is something else.

If you have no issues to your router then it gets hard. Delays to the ISP maybe bufferbloat but you need to see if you actually are using 100% of your bandwidth. With a single machine you should be able to watch the network tab of the resource monitor and see what you transmission and receive rates are. It will clearly show if some web page does a large refresh in the background.

The problem maybe outside your control. Could be delay in ISP networks, they also get bufferbloat because too many customers are trying to use their connections. Does little good for you to reduce your usage, just lets the other guys get better performance.

I ran ping commands for my router, ISP and google. Router and ISP were fine with 0% packet loss, but Google ended with 40% packet loss. Is there anything that I can do?

 

[bill001g]

Although you might not get it fixed what you do is run tracert and then the various hops in the trace trying to find the one that causes the initial problem. Be careful though loss in the middle that does not affect the next node is not real loss.

You can also try pathping command. Again you have to be very careful about the results from this tool.

In some ways packet loss is better than increase latency. ISP tend to fix packet loss especially when it is huge like yours. It generally is something that is broken rather than a design or overload condition unlike increase ping times which they don't care about.

Problem is going to be where this is happening. The farther away the worse it is. If it is say in googles network its not like you can call them up and ask them to fix it. Best if it is in your ISP. Still the level 1 tech you talk to generally only has access to the equipment that goes to your house the main router and other equipment they many times can not even look at.

 

[meme3ssar]

Although you might not get it fixed what you do is run tracert and then the various hops in the trace trying to find the one that causes the initial problem. Be careful though loss in the middle that does not affect the next node is not real loss.

You can also try pathping command. Again you have to be very careful about the results from this tool.

In some ways packet loss is better than increase latency. ISP tend to fix packet loss especially when it is huge like yours. It generally is something that is broken rather than a design or overload condition unlike increase ping times which they don't care about.

Problem is going to be where this is happening. The farther away the worse it is. If it is say in googles network its not like you can call them up and ask them to fix it. Best if it is in your ISP. Still the level 1 tech you talk to generally only has access to the equipment that goes to your house the main router and other equipment they many times can not even look at.

Thanks for replying. I did pathping 8.8.8.8 and had 8 hops. 1 to 6 were fine with 0% loss, but here are the last 3 hops:
6 32ms 0/ 100 = 0% 0/ 100 = 0% 10.38.148.38
100/ 100 =100% |
7 --- 100/ 100 =100% 0/ 100 = 0% 10.38.89.185
0/ 100 = 0% |
8 --- 100/ 100 =100% 0/ 100 = 0% 72.14.196.84

I will need your help identifying the problem

 

[bill001g]

This is a little hard to read but if you see 100% loss it has to be a lie. Again this is where automated tools can confuse you when you do not know what they are really doing.

Obviously if you had 100% loss google would never function for you. Since it works this means that you can not make any assumption based on that data. It pretty much means nothing, the router is likely configured to ignore the test packets.

You are not showing any issues it appears if the first hops are good and these look like this.

This is the problem with intermittent failures. Unless the problem happens while you are running the tool you will not detect the problem.

Pathping would kill your connection if it had a option to run constantly. So you have to make your own path ping.

You just open a bunch of CMD windows and let constant ping run to a number of hops in the path. When you see a issue with your game you quickly switch over and stop all the ping windows. You would then have to look at each screen and make your own determination as to which hop appears to be the cause.