Traffic shaping and response. time, what can I expect?
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Hey all,
I just recently used the pfsense liveCD on one of my PCs to test it out, and used it betwwen my network and my DSL router.
For reference, I have a 25/1 Mbit connection.The goal was to be able to use atleast most of hte connection for heavy bittorrent use, while still getting near optimal responsetime for all other programs, as if I wasn't running bittorrent at the same time.
I tried setting it up to deprioritize bittorrent, prioritize HTTP and ICMP (thats what ping uses right?), then using bittorrent a lot, while testing rsponsetime via pinging my ISP server and measuring bandwidth for HTTP via www.tptest.se
Without traffic shaping I only got a few mbits on tptest. with it I got about 12mbit - a good improvement.
However, the reactiontime of websites seemed to be pretty heavily impacted regardless, and pingtimes were nowhere near the 12ms that is what I get whlile the connection is idle. I got anywhere between 50ms to 1000+ms and even a few dropped packets for ping.As far as I could tell the CPU never went above 20% use throughout.
So the question is: Is this as good as I can expect it to get or am I dont something wrong?
Also, is trafficshaping the same as QoS, or something else?I hope someone can explain this to me, as I am still very new to QoS features. Is there any way to actually tame bittorrent given enough processing power?…
-Stigma
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Read this thread when you've had a coffee and can spare a half hour:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,2484.0.htmlIt'll help you calculate appropriate values for your queues, I suspect with heavy P2P use and a huge asymetry in your link speeds, your ACK queue may be getting drops.
The other possibility is that your PC is maxing it's connections and the slowdown/loss is local on your machine… -
I don't know much (newb), but I was having bad results with games. The solution for me was to lower the bandwidth settings in pf. What I think was happening was that the connection was actually being overloaded. I now set my max ul/dl setting to lower than actual and games are now smooth while I am d/l torrents. This is probably the same for your situation. Cable connections max speeds seem vary depending on what your neighbors are doing.
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with QoS you will ALWAYS need to drop your overall bandwidth to 20 % less than the actual WAN connection up/down speeds from your ISP.
Otherwise the ACK packets on your upload get jammed in a queue at the ISP equipment killing your attempts to do QoS.
Yes it sounds like a waste of bandwidth but its a small price to pay for better traffic management.