Greedy Firestick

[Rabb]

Hey guys.

First off I've been trying to use the search feature about this but the posts I looked at were vague in the answers or went off topic.

I've been using the XR500 for around a year now with a 70 down 20 up connection, QoS set to 65% down 70% up.

Aside from the usual CoD server issues I've not had much problem until last month. I went online like I normally would and my connection was horrible, it was spiking (1 second in game stutters) every 5-10 seconds but when looking at my ping it was always a steady connection of 25-35 depending on the server.

This eventually stopped happening and after a few nights of cursing my ISP I figured out it was everytime the wife was upstairs watching Netflix on the Firestick, thing she has almost always done this since CoD WWII and it never done this before in this game or the previous.

I've tried the following:

Increasing the xbox prioritisation to 80% and Firestick to 10% - no change

Rebooting all devices including the modem - no change

I don't really want to go down the route of turning off connection share and have to manually set values for every device in the house if I can help it.

The xbox is wired and the Firestick is wireless, the router is setup to use the same SSID on both 2.4G and 5G and as I type this I wonder if splitting it and connecting the firestick to the 2.4 would do anything.

Any ideas are welcome, I've included a picture of the network monitor but it's not really that informative.

 

[Netduma Alex]

It's interesting because even though the Fire Stick network usage is higher than the rest, it still shouldn't be overly taxing for a 70Mbps connection.

My first suggestion would have been Wi-Fi interference but since you're using ethernet on the Xbox, it shouldn't be a problem.

I wonder if the Fire Stick is being incorrectly prioritized? Try this:

• Go to QoS > Traffic Prioritization
• Disable the DumaOS Classified Games service
• Press ADD DEVICE, choose your console
• Under Basic, select Games Console

Now see if the problem still occurs.

[Rabb]

Unfortunately that had no change, I'll try putting the QoS on Always tomorrow and see what that does.

[Rabb]

No progress, I set it to Always, put the QoS to 70/70 and put the firestick on with Netflix running. No change.
I then put the QoS to 60/60. No Change.

I then turned the Netflix off and back to perfect again.

I've made a couple of gifs to show the differences.

http://imgur.com/a/HF6bCV3

[Netduma Fraser]

Is EVERY device in your home connected to the router or are there some connected to the ISP hub? If so please connect everything to the router and put your ISP hub in modem mode or put the router WAN IP in its DMZ and disable the ISP hub WiFi. Also please disable IPv6 then try again.

[Rabb]

Every device is connected to the XR500, I didn't want to use BTs Home Hub so I've been using an Openreach modem.

I disabled IPV6 but had the same issue.

I decided to factory reset the router and all I put in was the port forwarding for CoD and set the QoS to 70/70, no geo Filter or anything else. Same issue.

 

[Netduma Fraser]

Alex is right, the amount of bandwidth it is using shouldn't be affecting you much. What I would suggest is that you saturate your connection as much as possible, use the Firestick also and gradually keep changing the Anti-BB percentages while following this guide and see if you can get it at a stable level: http://support.netduma.com/support/solutions/articles/16000074717-diagnose-modem-internet-service-provider-issues/

You mentioned BT also, are you using PPPoE on the XR500?

[Rabb]

I am indeed using PPPoE with Connection Always On, it was all pre-filled in by the setup of the router with just the input of the BT username and password.

I've just done a quick test before leaving for work and went to an extreme level of adjusting the QoS to 30/30 and instead of getting 100+ spikes it was spiking to about 58 which is getting better I guess. I'll have a read of the guide tomorrow and run some more thorough testing.

[Netduma Fraser]

It could be to do with PPPoE but keep investigating. You could also go above 70%, going down might not necessarily be the way to go, I would go in intervals of 10 then 5 once you find a % that is promising.

[Rabb]

Ok so I think i've got somewhere. I ran Ping Plotter from 100% and went down in 5% increments, it was actually quite surprising that, for example, 65% could be okish but 60% be terrible and then 50% be ok again.

So i've attached the results for those intrested, 20% up and 20% down was the sweet spot.

I suppose that last thing to test is tomorow when I go to play CoD i'll set the QoS to " When High Priority Traffic Detected" rather than "Always" and see how it goes, i'll just have to set it to "Never" when the Xbox gets any downloads.

[Netduma Alex]

The ability to separate download traffic from gaming traffic on consoles is something that's on the roadmap for sure.

[Netduma Fraser]

That's fantastic! Should still provide enough bandwidth for your gaming and Firestick streaming even at that %, let us know how you get on when you actually try it when gaming! 

[Rabb]

Had a full night of steady pings and great games. Cheers guys.

[Netduma Alex]

Oh man it's so satisfying to see those PingPlotter results. Mmm hmm that's one stable ping, nice.

[Codeman]

I just have a question on how this works. If I'm not mistaken, the OP has limited their bandwidth to 20% of their 70/20 which makes their bandwidth 14/4. Their bandwidth usage with the firestick and gaming was approximately 4.75/.25 so how did this have any effect? They were not even using enough bandwidth to get to the level where it effected ping. Maybe I'm confused on what effect anti buffer bloat has. I actually had the same exact problem the OP had of QoS having no effect on my roku streaming netflix a long time ago but with no good solution I had gotten rid of my netduma since limiting my then extremely limited bandwidth via anti bufferbloat was not possible and would make netflix unwatchable.

[Netduma Fraser]

1 hour ago, Codeman said:

I just have a question on how this works. If I'm not mistaken, the OP has limited their bandwidth to 20% of their 70/20 which makes their bandwidth 14/4. Their bandwidth usage with the firestick and gaming was approximately 4.75/.25 so how did this have any effect? They were not even using enough bandwidth to get to the level where it effected ping. Maybe I'm confused on what effect anti buffer bloat has. I actually had the same exact problem the OP had of QoS having no effect on my roku streaming netflix a long time ago but with no good solution I had gotten rid of my netduma since limiting my then extremely limited bandwidth via anti bufferbloat was not possible and would make netflix unwatchable.

If you have lots of devices using the internet at once it can cause a network queue, obviously the more bandwidth being used the bigger this queue will be but there will be a queue regardless. Anti-Bufferbloat ensures that the devices don't impact each other. May seem counter intuitive that throttling the bandwidth helps but it does.

[Codeman]

But how would a queue matter when supposedly the Netduma puts gaming traffic at the front of the line? You're right this just doesn't make sense to me when I have used other router's QoS while maxing out the bandwidth and they worked perfectly fine without throttling it by much. It didn't even look as though the OP's other devices were active.

[Netduma Fraser]

Yes it does, that's one way it prevents lag. Buffering etc can still be caused if there is not enough bandwidth or its using too much. Most QoS solutions do not actually do much. I'd recommend you take a look at the ? icons on the QoS panels as they go into more details about how it works.

[Azlios]

 

 

Similar to the problem I had, streaming sticks seem to like to cause problems.

[Netduma Fraser]

It's very strange, I think it might be something we need to test ourselves in the lab.

[progprogprog]

YouTube uses tcp/udp protocol 

As far as I'm aware port 443 udp is include in traffic prioritisation covering ports 1-65535

Could it be that with classified games tick this is causing the issue 

If so it should be removed from the port range

[Netduma Fraser]

9 minutes ago, progprogprog said:

YouTube uses tcp/udp protocol 

As far as I'm aware port 443 udp is include in traffic prioritisation covering ports 1-65535

Could it be that with classified games tick this is causing the issue 

If so it should be removed from the port range

Classified games uses DPI so unlikely that it is flagging this and the services for console uses 1024-65535. Its been mentioned above that disabling Traffic Prioritization doesn't resolve it. I've put forth a recommendation to the team to get a Firestick/TV streaming stick to test with.

[Bert]

The issue with QoS in this way is that it's very hard to control whats coming in from the internet.

 

Ie Firestick and whatever game you are playing on the Xbox compete with eachother for traffic but Firestick is likely already having priority upstream at your ISP. TCP by nature tries to fill as much bandwidth as it can, it's auto negotiating.

 

You mention that it occurs in spikes. Whenever I watch youtube and Netflix and watch the traffic monitor then I see that it's not a constant stream, but the datapackets are recieved in bursts. I am not so sure on how accurate the DumaOS network monitor is since it takes a sample every 1-0,5 sec or so. Peak load might actually be higher than you think.

 

Something you could try is disabling share excess on download and simply giving the Firestick enough download so the sending speed from the host is regulated down, so it sends more but shorter bursts.

 

In this case wifi is beeing used, but in larger home networks that have switches installed it's sometimes handy to set a port rate limit and then you can leave the DumaOS setting on share excess.

 

Sidequestion here is how does the Games console setting achieve two way QoS?

As far as I understand QoS:

On download source is coming from the server and destination is towards your home device

On upload source is coming from the home device and destination is towards the server.

 

So I have added a manual config where I prioritize UDP 3074 as source and 1024-65535 as destination (CoD game traffic is UDP port 3074) But I can't add source 1024-65535 at the same time. Ie I can manually QoS upstream but not downstream at the same time, and vice versa. But the automatic algorithm can do this?

[Netduma Alex]

Woah you're asking some real interesting questions. Questions I don't think I can answer. Luckily somebody who can answer is in the office so i'll see if I can get an answer from them.

[Codeman]

Azlios's issue was similar to mine a long time ago when I reported that QoS wasn't working with Netflix on my Roku. I never found a solution but I have since increased my bandwidth making QoS unnecessary. It'll be interesting to see if the cause is ever found by Netduma.