Oddities with setting up Traffic Shaping?
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Hello all,
Really hoping someone can help me out. I mentioned this in #pfsense on freenode but got mostly silence other than "now THAT is strange." :)
Specs: 100 megabit down 5 megabit up WAN connection, Pfsense with 2 lans, 1 wan. (really only concerned about 1 of those lans)
I've attempted to use both the wizard as well as setting up my own queues to limit properly. I have a fairly simplistic queue set that only needs linkshare %. no minimums or reservations.
For both upstream/downstream the issue I am having is that if I set the speeds exactly as advertised my speeds are woefully slower than expected. No other traffic to bog anything down or compete, and I find myself only getting 50-60 meg down and 2.8-3.2 up. I am forced to inch up the speeds higher and higher to get "Acceptable" speeds nearest my max speeds. (I basically run speedtests nonstop while increasing things slowly until I find the megabit speed RIGHT before I begin to see ping time increase during the upload/download.) In this case, i'm running at 118 meg down and 5.6 up to get "85-97" megabit (varies slightly) and roughly 5 down.
This seems to be clearly incorrect or way too drastic. I HAVE to be doing something wrong.
Curious if anyone can guide me in the right direction?
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Nobody? :(
Sadface lol
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Not to be a buzzkill or anything but there are plenty of posts in this forum about shaping and what works and doesnt work. I used the limiters in an earlier post at a 125person LAN party with great success with 2 50MB/5MB modems.
Some things I have found with my experience with PFSense:
1. Shaper wizard is okay but make your own queues - less is more under the shaper queues.
2. Use aliases for rules.
3. Use floating rules for shaping and choose your WAN (s) interfaces not the LAN interfaces. You dont want to shape traffic on the LAN generally.You just have to dive in and experiment with it. Try it one way and then document it , then try it another. And just test , test, test.
And this is a public forum so no one is getting paid to give out advice.
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That's the problem. Not everyone has the time to reinvent the wheel. HFSC is poorly documented in general, and pfSense's implementation is documented even worse still with no examples used to explain the concepts. There is no One Guide to Inform Them All. You have to read a zillion forum posts, a bajillion Google hits and you're still left scratching your head. In a corporate environment, one can't afford the luxury of playing around on the network while users are trying to work. Every day there are several new posts in this forum, all saying a variation of the same thing: how does shaping work? How do I do what I want to do (which is usually a simple case)? The replies are always the same, too: read the forum, Google, play around. That is simply not good enough.
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If it a business then imo paying for the support would be the first thing I would do.
I know I have posted several things in the forums with pictures along with several other members as well. Plus I am sure that most of us have other jobs that keep us busy just like everyone else.
I would say if you post specific questions with examples of your current config that is not working , perhaps that would help the process and enable people to provide answers instead of general questions of ambiguity.
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I do have a support contract with PfSense. That said, I just used the wizard to create a VoIP rule for our requirements. However, one shouldn't need to rely on paid support just to understand a feature if it is documented well enough. I've also asked the HangOut to do a module on shaping with simple and more complex examples, but I don't know if that will happen. I do realize that pfSense is built using lots of code not created by the pfSense team, and as such they shouldn't be responsible for supporting all of FreeBSD, but traffic shaping is a major part of any router these days, and having an inscrutable shaper isn't helpful. All the stickies at the top of this forum are ancient and just as baffling. The chapter on shaping in the new Definitive Guide is better than the 1.2 book, but still leaves a lot to be desired.
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Thanks for the info sideout.
I've done plenty of research with traffic shaper but strangely my results just seem to differ from other peoples.
I'll reread about the traffic shaping.
Now… the only thing I'm concerned about is on the LAN. that may be my issue. I'm concerned with downstream since services pulling down max bandwidth will wind up raising my latency sincem y downstream is saturated.
I'll play with it more and do further reading. Thanks.
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I have shared my config that I used in this forum if you want to try that out.
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I just stumbled on this yesterday and it is the best writeup of HFSC that I have seen yet:
http://ace-host.stuart.id.au/russell/files/tc/doc/sch_hfsc.txt
