If no QoS is DumaOS worth it?

[Bert]

It doesn't need to hyperlane things ahead on the way in. It probably can but there is no point since you are not bottlenecked anywhere internally on the router for wired connections.

 

Traffic arrives from internet on your WAN interface, at 1 Gbps, this is full duplex so happens simultaneously with sending your data to internet. It then forwards this traffic to the internal switch via the internal bus, with 1GBps or higher speed which in turn routes it to the interface going to your device. So after your data arrives on the switch chip it is already split up between multiple interfaces, which are 1GBps each so you will not be saturating them.

 

This is why priority queues on incoming traffic are pointless on wired systems.

 

The only exception to this is wifi, where you cannot forward at line rate to clients if you have a 1 Gbps WAN connection, but usually on half the speed. This is where QoS or priority queues work for incoming traffic. Partly because bandwidth is lower and also because clients need to share airtime and cannot communicate simultaneously.

 

WAN/LAN interfaces only have sending queues, and receiving buffers. Not only in routers but also for example in switches and networking cards. The thing to understand here is that when a PFIFO or other type of queue is used, it only acts on the sending interface. Data gets transferred from the receiving buffer to another sending queue or separate PFIFO queue. And is then forwarded to the next destination. If you forward packets at line rate, the receiving buffer will stay empty and packets arriving in the receiving buffer are forwarded directly. So it doesn't benefit you putting them in a different queue as both are empty.

 

This is assuming all your devices are using 1GBps. QoS / Traffic queues work on a per hop basis. That means if your traffic passes from a router to a switch and then to your clients, the switch simply treats it as first in first out unless you have switches that also run QoS. So if you attach say a 100mbit switch to a 1Gbit LAN port on the router with multiple devices then you can run into issues on your wired system simply because the switch hogs traffic. So this construction can also lead to bufferbloat on your internal network. Same is true for wireless access points, if you attach a wireless access point to the router via a switch you are again creating a bottleneck. This is rare cases though and have more to do with proper topology design than traffic queues on the router. 

 

To illustrate the above, I once tested limiting bandwidth to my PS4 to 2mbit via a managed switch so I don't need to limit the entire network. Played fine until at some point I was getting stuttering and ping spikes. What happened. The PS4 started downloading a update in the background and this was overfilling the buffers on the switch which was limited to 2mbit output to my PS4. In other words I created my own bufferbloat to the PS4.

[CRarsenxL]

2 hours ago, Bert said:

It doesn't need to hyperlane things ahead on the way in. It probably can but there is no point since you are not bottlenecked anywhere internally on the router for wired connections.

 

Traffic arrives from internet on your WAN interface, at 1 Gbps, this is full duplex so happens simultaneously with sending your data to internet. It then forwards this traffic to the internal switch via the internal bus, with 1GBps or higher speed which in turn routes it to the interface going to your device. So after your data arrives on the switch chip it is already split up between multiple interfaces, which are 1GBps each so you will not be saturating them.

 

This is why priority queues on incoming traffic are pointless on wired systems.

 

The only exception to this is wifi, where you cannot forward at line rate to clients if you have a 1 Gbps WAN connection, but usually on half the speed. This is where QoS or priority queues work for incoming traffic. Partly because bandwidth is lower and also because clients need to share airtime and cannot communicate simultaneously.

 

WAN/LAN interfaces only have sending queues, and receiving buffers. Not only in routers but also for example in switches and networking cards. The thing to understand here is that when a PFIFO or other type of queue is used, it only acts on the sending interface. Data gets transferred from the receiving buffer to another sending queue or separate PFIFO queue. And is then forwarded to the next destination. If you forward packets at line rate, the receiving buffer will stay empty and packets arriving in the receiving buffer are forwarded directly. So it doesn't benefit you putting them in a different queue as both are empty.

 

This is assuming all your devices are using 1GBps. QoS / Traffic queues work on a per hop basis. That means if your traffic passes from a router to a switch and then to your clients, the switch simply treats it as first in first out unless you have switches that also run QoS. So if you attach say a 100mbit switch to a 1Gbit LAN port on the router with multiple devices then you can run into issues on your wired system simply because the switch hogs traffic. So this construction can also lead to bufferbloat on your internal network. Same is true for wireless access points, if you attach a wireless access point to the router via a switch you are again creating a bottleneck. This is rare cases though and have more to do with proper topology design than traffic queues on the router. 

 

To illustrate the above, I once tested limiting bandwidth to my PS4 to 2mbit via a managed switch so I don't need to limit the entire network. Played fine until at some point I was getting stuttering and ping spikes. What happened. The PS4 started downloading a update in the background and this was overfilling the buffers on the switch which was limited to 2mbit output to my PS4. In other words I created my own bufferbloat to the PS4.

But the traffic that is being hyperlaned, is on the way out essentially how the router delivers the ordering of packets. Normal routers won’t do that.

 

also for NICs, do you recommend max recieve and sending buffers?

 

can the netduma xr1000 buffer become full? How would I know?

 

I use Moca adapters attached to my router for my set top boxes can that cause issues?(they just need internet connectivity and use very little bandwidth)

 

what devices do you recommend I use for gig network for gaming?

 

also any pc network card setting recommendations?

[Bert]

If your buffer on the router gets full you essentially notice it as bufferbloat, ping spikes etc. Only this would in theory only ever happen on the wifi interface. Wifi should have a built in media/gaming QoS though.

 

I use a Aquantica AQC107 NIC in my gaming PC. There is not so much in it though since gaming is generally a light load. You would not be doing many other things with your PC when you are playing games. Maybe download/upload some torrents in the background but in that case I would simply limit the bandwidth in your torrent program.

 

If you want you can turn interrupt moderation off and flow control off if they are enabled. Flow control usually doesn't do much though unless it's enabled on your router or switch.

 

I don't generally adjust the buffers on NIC's. In some cases NIC drivers need some tuning but this is more on higher bandwidth stuff, 5Gbit and 10Gbit NIC's if you put them in old systems. Newer stuff is generally fine. And this is to reach very high bandwidths, ie 1100 MB/s. For 1Gbit cards all this stuff is practically not applicable. There is some stuff that can be hardware offloaded on more pricey NIC's like the Intel ones but nowadays PC's are so fast that you will not notice this in the slightest. Ie a 10Gbit transfer to my old i7-2600 would cause 30% CPU load, 1 Gbit 3-4%, on my present AMD 5950X they are not even noticeable and on top of that playing CoD only loads up the CPU 30% or so. For 1Gbit just stick with onboard NIC, you won't notice any difference with a expensive Intel one. 

[CRarsenxL]

12 hours ago, Bert said:

If your buffer on the router gets full you essentially notice it as bufferbloat, ping spikes etc. Only this would in theory only ever happen on the wifi interface. Wifi should have a built in media/gaming QoS though.

 

I use a Aquantica AQC107 NIC in my gaming PC. There is not so much in it though since gaming is generally a light load. You would not be doing many other things with your PC when you are playing games. Maybe download/upload some torrents in the background but in that case I would simply limit the bandwidth in your torrent program.

 

If you want you can turn interrupt moderation off and flow control off if they are enabled. Flow control usually doesn't do much though unless it's enabled on your router or switch.

 

I don't generally adjust the buffers on NIC's. In some cases NIC drivers need some tuning but this is more on higher bandwidth stuff, 5Gbit and 10Gbit NIC's if you put them in old systems. Newer stuff is generally fine. And this is to reach very high bandwidths, ie 1100 MB/s. For 1Gbit cards all this stuff is practically not applicable. There is some stuff that can be hardware offloaded on more pricey NIC's like the Intel ones but nowadays PC's are so fast that you will not notice this in the slightest. Ie a 10Gbit transfer to my old i7-2600 would cause 30% CPU load, 1 Gbit 3-4%, on my present AMD 5950X they are not even noticeable and on top of that playing CoD only loads up the CPU 30% or so. For 1Gbit just stick with onboard NIC, you won't notice any difference with a expensive Intel one. 

I have an aquantia too except it’s the TX401 by TPLINK.

 

Also, would an IQRouter help? It optimized bufferbloat automatically.

 

Also,  VZG3100 apparently have specific queue types for packets like gaming, so it’s better than duma os routers traffic prio wtf?
 

Do you think the ONT VZ has, does automatic traffic queueing?

maybe the ONT and VZ router combo are meant to go together?

why would you recommend No QoS on a gig line w 25 devices? At times, web pages do load slow and my pc is super fast.

I have enabled :

Ipv4 checksum offlod

RSS queues : 8

recieve side scaling : disabled 

large send V1 and V2 offload

MAX TXandRX Buffers on NIC

Recieve segment offload enabled 

 

 

[Bert]

You should actually enable receive side scaling as it distributes incoming file transfers across all CPU cores, with it off it only loads a single core. And RSS queues should be set equal or lower than the amount of CPU cores you have. Altough present generation this is also not an issue but for CPU's made some years ago it can be. RSS on or off is not an issue for 1Gbit in newer systems though, just on is more efficient.

 

I haven't heard of these IQ routers but it looks like it's just a router running a version of FQ_Codel or CAKE.

 

ONT's and routers do not always need to go together. But ONT's can have their own QoS and traffic shaping set by the ISP yes. I use a Huawai ONT and that definitly has the ability to apply QoS (haven't figured out how to get into it though)

[CRarsenxL]

1 hour ago, Bert said:

You should actually enable receive side scaling as it distributes incoming file transfers across all CPU cores, with it off it only loads a single core. And RSS queues should be set equal or lower than the amount of CPU cores you have. Altough present generation this is also not an issue but for CPU's made some years ago it can be. RSS on or off is not an issue for 1Gbit in newer systems though, just on is more efficient.

 

I haven't heard of these IQ routers but it looks like it's just a router running a version of FQ_Codel or CAKE.

 

ONT's and routers do not always need to go together. But ONT's can have their own QoS and traffic shaping set by the ISP yes. I use a Huawai ONT and that definitly has the ability to apply QoS (haven't figured out how to get into it though)

Thoughts on 

And am I correct?

 

is that y I felt such a bad change between using netduma vs ISP? Dscp tags this whole time?

 

[CRarsenxL]

On 12/16/2021 at 2:41 AM, Bert said:

If your buffer on the router gets full you essentially notice it as bufferbloat, ping spikes etc. Only this would in theory only ever happen on the wifi interface. Wifi should have a built in media/gaming QoS though.

 

I use a Aquantica AQC107 NIC in my gaming PC. There is not so much in it though since gaming is generally a light load. You would not be doing many other things with your PC when you are playing games. Maybe download/upload some torrents in the background but in that case I would simply limit the bandwidth in your torrent program.

 

If you want you can turn interrupt moderation off and flow control off if they are enabled. Flow control usually doesn't do much though unless it's enabled on your router or switch.

 

I don't generally adjust the buffers on NIC's. In some cases NIC drivers need some tuning but this is more on higher bandwidth stuff, 5Gbit and 10Gbit NIC's if you put them in old systems. Newer stuff is generally fine. And this is to reach very high bandwidths, ie 1100 MB/s. For 1Gbit cards all this stuff is practically not applicable. There is some stuff that can be hardware offloaded on more pricey NIC's like the Intel ones but nowadays PC's are so fast that you will not notice this in the slightest. Ie a 10Gbit transfer to my old i7-2600 would cause 30% CPU load, 1 Gbit 3-4%, on my present AMD 5950X they are not even noticeable and on top of that playing CoD only loads up the CPU 30% or so. For 1Gbit just stick with onboard NIC, you won't notice any difference with a expensive Intel one. 

How can I adjust tx and rx buffers for best latency for gaming?

Ive got a aquantia and it can go super high obviously or I can go low.

Also, I am on gigabit so how will I know when my buffer on my router gets too big? When it raises my ping? And what’s the best way to set the sliders? 

 

Saturation test? Or saturation while adjusting bufferbloat sliders and reducing under I get no more tcp retransmission?

[CRarsenxL]

On 12/7/2021 at 4:12 PM, Netduma Jack B said:

Hi @CRarsenxL
I noticed that you said in your original post that you dont think that QoS can have an effect on your connection due to it being Gigabit- i recently tested this myself and have attached my findings for you to take a look at. They include steps to reproduce the experiment as well should you want to try yourself!

Furthermore, our WLAN Wireless QoS system makes an even bigger difference on high bandwidth connections, ill include the evaluation of that one as well.

I'll also try and answer some of your other questions, but i can't give too much information away about exactly how it works.

Yes, Traffic Prio is configurable to allow you to put any traffic that you want prioritised as long as you know the source ports or destination ports of that flow. As for FIFO, I don't think that we use it at all on our routers even if Netduma QoS is disabled, but i will have to ask a Developer when im back in the office.

I'm not sure if i fully understand your question, but as for whether ISP's use FIFO - this is something that ISP's generally don't disclose.  I personally think this is due to the Net Neutrality movement a few years ago. If you're truly interested about how ISP's deal with congestion on their networks i would take a look at RFC6057.
 

No we don't! But I'll pass that on to Kieran as a video idea for the future!
 

From what i understand, bufferbloat can happen in both upload and download directions.
 

The NPG routers may have more layers to the OS, but they all make up for that by running on exceptional hardware - you can't really notice the difference. As for the Wi-Fi 6 R3  -

Hope this clears up all your questions.

DumaOS - Congestion Control testing.pdf 1.34 MB · 46 downloads

Quick thing on this. You have ping plotter set to .01 seconds. Does this still indicate PL even if it’s that subliminal?

[Netduma Fraser]

28 minutes ago, CRarsenxL said:

Quick thing on this. You have ping plotter set to .01 seconds. Does this still indicate PL even if it’s that subliminal?

Yes it can, as you can see from the examples in the guide we did see packet loss when using that interval

[CRarsenxL]

14 minutes ago, Netduma Fraser said:

Yes it can, as you can see from the examples in the guide we did see packet loss when using that interval

Interesting. This isn’t talked about more. Subliminal packet loss can be undetectable in windows pings and ONLY found using PP .01 and testing.