HFSC Config used at 150 person LAN Party
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Just had our 150 person LAN party this weekend. We had 3 TWC 50/5 modems hooked up.
Used my HFSC shaping config with Codel queuing .
At one point I had the limiter set for 90Mbit and we had about 85Mbit sustained HTTP / Web traffic going and were still getting under 100MS pings in LoL (League of Legends) games and other internet games we had going. We even had a twitch TV stream going the whole time streaming the event and doing some spectate casting of games with commentary.
This is a 3 WAN / 1 LAN config with a ton of floating rules and Alias's used.
if your interested in getting the config - PM me with your email and I will send it to you. I am working on getting a clean Single WAN / LAN config and will put that up in dropbox for people to download.
Ran this on an Intel Core i3 quad core CPU with 8G RAM on a 256G SSD with a 4 port Intel ToE Server NIC in it. That feed into a Dell PowerConnect 2824 switch.
For me at least HFSC works out great and does what I need.
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here is the config for single wan / single lan use.
A couple of things:
1. Limiter is set at 40Mbit so be aware of that.
2. This is optimized so that qGames, qLoL , qDNS have reserved bandwidth for those queues.
3. qCatchall and qDefault have lower bandwidth.
4. Read over my floating rules and redo them as needed.Again this is optimized for LAN party use where you have people trying to game on mostly UDP packets versus all the people who forgot to update or install games at home trying to download on TCP.
This works for me at my LAN parties . I do 4 a year of 150 people each and I have practically zero issues using it unless it is past the modem.if you get new games and they run like crap , you will need to research ports , make a floating rule and assign it to qGames and that should resolve it.
Enjoy.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/drih6ls87l0iaoh/singlewansinglanconfig.zip?dl=0
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Have you noticed whether HFSC "Priority" actually works or not?
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No I haven't but then I don't really care because I am setting real time limits on my high level queues anyways so they have reserved space on the meter.
I use the load balancing limiter so it shares my bandwidth that I set equally for the most part across all the people trying to download.
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For me , with having qDNS and qACK with reserved bandwidth along with my other queues , like qLoL and qGames , I am able to put my own level of priority into it. LAN parties are unique situations to shape and deal with.
You have all kinds of games running from Plants versus Zombies running TCP to LoL and Blizzard games using UDP then throw in Steam downloads and LoL downloads and you can have a mess real fast without some control.
This config is probably my best one yet and the result of about 6 LAN parties of playing with along with running it at home on my network.
I am far from a technical HFSC person however , I know that I can run it on my PFSense and get it to do what I need it to do. Hopefully now that I have golden config , I won't have to mess with it alot and be able to enjoy the LAN's more than in the past.
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If it works, it works. I am mostly theory and simulation, with very little real-world experience.
Dealing with bulk download traffic is something I am trying to learn more about.
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Is there a specific reason you don't have qACK configured with any realtime?
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Thanks for the post.
Limiter is set at 40Mbit so be aware of that.
Where is that? I didn't see an actual limiter defined if that's what you mean. I do see the WAN set to 5.5 Mbps, which I believe is the only thing that needs to be modified to suit the bandwidth?
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Traffic shaper > Limiter > Download queue - set to 40Mbit
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Here it is.
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Is there a specific reason you don't have qACK configured with any realtime?
In the lan party config i have it set to realtime. This is my home / lan party config and i changed it back to just link share here. I set it to realtime of 10 at the LAN.
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OK, thanks. I thought it was something that was missing from the shaper config.xml. If you have a 40 Mbps limiter, why do you have WAN set to 5.5 Mbps?
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That is upload limt. The Download queue in the shaper is used in the LAN rule to limt TCP streams. This shares whatever you set in there equally with all machines wanting a TCP stream.
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If you want to test it , set it 10Mbit , run a speed test. Close all browser windows . Set it to 5Mbit , run a speedtest again.
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What I mean is, why do you have a 40 Mbps limiter when the WAN queue in the shaper is set to 5.5 Mbps? I thought that if your WAN is set to 5.5 Mbps then your limiter would have to be less than that…?
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If you look at the rule the limiter is only applied to the LAN. You are looking at the WAN bandwidth on the Traffic shaper which is what you set from your ISP limits.
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Have you noticed whether HFSC "Priority" actually works or not?
Doesn't the fact that the priority, if set on an HFSC queue, doesn't make it into the pf altq queue config at all pretty much settle that?
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Have you noticed whether HFSC "Priority" actually works or not?
Doesn't the fact that the priority, if set on an HFSC queue, doesn't make it into the pf altq queue config at all pretty much settle that?
Yes, that along with the fact that the m1/d/m2 parameters are technically how HFSC's prioritization is configured, but I thought I would ask anyway.
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If you look at the rule the limiter is only applied to the LAN.
OK< that's the part I was missing. You would think I would have picked that up by the names, Download_LAN, Upload_LAN, but no…
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Yes I try and apply the KISS principle to any of my naming conventions . That way if I get hit by a bus , someone should be able to come in behind me and pick it easily.
Glad you found it.
