A definitive, example-driven, HFSC Reference Thread

[Derelict]

Please don't delete.  It's good content.  If anything ask a mod to move them to a new thread.

[1activegeek]

First off, a hats off to @Derelict for starting this thread. And a HUGE thank you to @Georgeman for contributing the time and patience to help educate. Along with the others contributing. This thread has single handedly given me the most complete and best view of how to use HFSC for traffic shaping. I've read a lot, but some of the (as the title suggests) example-driven scenarios to help solidify and illustrate what is meant by a whole blurb of words. I liken this to watching Law & Order vs just reading the jury transcript and interpreting. (ignoring the fact of course that Law & Order is all fake).

That said, I've got a similar setup to Derelict from the first post, but currently just focusing on the WAN/LAN and will handle DMZ/Guest later. I did not start from scratch, only because I wanted some of the rules from the Wizard in place (RDP ports, Xbox ports, etc). Rather than note them all down and re-create, I figure I would let the wizard do the work. Since doing so, I've then created some additional categories and will be removing others once I figure out my issues illustrated here. I know there may be some nuance changes in the latest 2.3.x version which I'm currently running vs these threads from over 2yrs ago. So I figure why not continue a very USEFUL thread.

I've included a few screenshots to help illustrate a few points, and need a few bits of clarity to help:

1. Why are my Queues WAY above the actual Link values? My WAN link is ~125/13 (cable variations). As seen in the indication, I've got values for Bandwidth that measure ABOVE both of those numbers on LAN and WAN. I believe my understanding was Up/Down could happen on either link (examples of FTP established from LAN, but could upload or download files). But in my example I'm seeing numbers even above my 125Mb possible.
2. How can I identify why I have such a LARGE amount of DROPS? Are these all DROPS from actual Queue traffic, or is this also including FW drops based on bad traffic or rules terminating attempts to hit my network? I'm assuming this is only showing DROPS for the Queues, which when uploading data at about 7Mb Up, it starts dropping about 100 packets every refresh cycle watching the queues.
3. Assuming the DROPS are correct, why is the Quality monitoring showing NO packet loss? I should assume this would look similar to the trend of DROPS?

I've also added an additional screenshot of the 2 speed tests run on DSLreports speedtest to help illustrate a side benefit of enabling the Traffic Shaping - BufferBloat resolution! You can see it goes from a C, to an A and the quality even jumps up to an A+. Hoping some of you are still around the boards, and can offer some input to help me in moving along.

[Harvy66]

1. You can see in your LAN traffic that all of your data is actually going into qLink, that's at least one reason why you're not actually shaping
2. did you actually set an upper limit to your qInternet? Shaping only works well if you tell it how much bandwidth you have

[georgeman]

It looks that you are not properly tagging the outbound traffic, since most of your download ends up in the default queue. Tagging is best done with floating rules, action match, interface WAN, direction OUT (I neither remember nor care about what the wizard does). Remember that floating rules processing for match rules don't stop with the first match, so the LAST matching rule wins. Make sure you catch all relevant traffic with these rules.

As regards the drops, remember that drops are NOT a bad thing. Dropping packets is a natural way TCP has to tell the other end that the packet rate needs to be lowered. It is better for it to happen on your router, where you have control of it, instead of on some upstream ISP router. This is why it is SO important to set the correct upper limits for all this to work, as Harvy66 just said. If you set a higher-than-real upper limit, your pfSense will never drop packets, they will be dropped by the ISP router instead, so you won't be actually shaping anything

[georgeman]

Also, do you have a qDefault queue on your LAN? If you don't, this is (another) flaw in the wizard. When you tag a TCP packet going out of WAN, the return traffic (the actual download) gets into the queue on LAN that has the same name as the one previously tagged on WAN. If it is not there, ends up in the default queue. This seems to be your case

[1activegeek]

Removing my message, as 1 question is irrelevant, and the other is below in next post with more detail.

[1activegeek]

Ok, so I've worked on putting together the queues, and run into an issue stopping me from being able to get very far. It seems I can't leave the Bandwidth blank on the WAN/LAN "top level" queues. So I input the 95% values in there (10/125). I then attempted putting in the numbers as advised for qInternet (95% aka 10Mb) and qLink (20%) - but I can't save and create the qLink queue. I continue to get the message:

"The sum of child bandwidth is higher than parent."

And for clarity and reference, this is the current "planned" setup. For the time being I've used 5% so I can at least build out the Queues:
(All below are Bandwidth/Linkshare m2 values made to be the same per George instructions)

WAN - 10Mb (95%)
-qInternet - 95% or 10Mb
  -qHighest - 15%
  -qACK - 20%
  -qHigh - 15%
  -qMedium - 20%
  -qDefault - 20%
  -qLow - 8%
  -qLowest - 2%
-qLink (Default) 20%
LAN - 125Mb (95%)
-qInternet - 95% or 125Mb
  -qHighest - 15%
  -qACK - 20%
  -qHigh - 15%
  -qMedium - 20%
  -qDefault - 20%
  -qLow - 8%
  -qLowest - 2%
-qLink (Default) 20%


[georgeman]

That's because the child queues are indeed exceeding the parent one!!

Just put 1Gbps or whatever the physical interface is (on the interface queue)

[Harvy66]

@georgeman:

That's because the child queues are indeed exceeding the parent one!!

Just put 1Gbps or whatever the physical interface is (on the interface queue)

If he sets the Link to 1Gb, then he needs to set the Upper Limit in the qInternet queues, which he has not.

Remember guys, "bandwidth" is the minimum bandwidth, but you need to still set your maximum.

@1activegeek:

Ok, so I've worked on putting together the queues, and run into an issue stopping me from being able to get very far. It seems I can't leave the Bandwidth blank on the WAN/LAN "top level" queues. So I input the 95% values in there (10/125). I then attempted putting in the numbers as advised for qInternet (95% aka 10Mb) and qLink (20%) - but I can't save and create the qLink queue. I continue to get the message:

"The sum of child bandwidth is higher than parent."

And for clarity and reference, this is the current "planned" setup. For the time being I've used 5% so I can at least build out the Queues:
(All below are Bandwidth/Linkshare m2 values made to be the same per George instructions)

WAN - 10Mb (95%)
-qInternet - 95% or 10Mb
  -qHighest - 15%
  -qACK - 20%
  -qHigh - 15%
  -qMedium - 20%
  -qDefault - 20%
  -qLow - 8%
  -qLowest - 2%
-qLink (Default) 20%
LAN - 125Mb (95%)
-qInternet - 95% or 125Mb
  -qHighest - 15%
  -qACK - 20%
  -qHigh - 15%
  -qMedium - 20%
  -qDefault - 20%
  -qLow - 8%
  -qLowest - 2%
-qLink (Default) 20%

95% + 20% > 100%

I don't get the LAN when you show "LAN - 125Mb (95%)" and "qInternet - 95% or 125Mb". If qInternet is 95% of LAN, and LAN is 125, then qInternet is ~119.

[Nullity]

Also, isn't "Bandwidth" really just link-share's m2 param (except on root interface queue, yeah?)? If so, that means it is only a proportional value, not a hard minimum/maximum. So, to easily avoid exceeding the parent just use low but proportionally equivilant values like 2Kb and 5Kb rather than 20Mb and 50Mb, respectively.

[1activegeek]

All - I'm going to thank everyone is advance for their help and patience. I think the picture is starting to become a bit clearer.

The reason I was setting my WAN/LAN is because pfSense won't let me NOT set these values. So I opted to fill them with the 95% of REAL bandwidth as suggested originally. This worked out to WAN = 10Mb, LAN =125Mb. The next instruction was to create the hierarchy of qInternet/qDNS-qBulk and qLink. Where qInternet was to match the 95% of REAL bandwidth (again inputting 10Mb/125Mb). qLink was then supposed to be set to 20%, which yes I get is above 100% (95+20>100). I basically hit the wall there not understanding how I could mimic the original setup.

So I think I get this but wanted to confirm a few ideas:

• WAN should be set to the actual limit (aka 95% of REAL speed) for the interface because there is no overhead available between my modem and the provider?
• qLink isn't really necessary on the WAN interface, because qLink is intended for local LAN traffic only?
• LAN should be set to the line/link speed of the interface (aka 1Gb port, set to 1Gb Bandwidth) to allow for handling LOCAL traffic as well
• UL needs to be set on qInternet for LAN (per Harvvy comment)

Assuming those 4 statements are correct, my setup would then be:

WAN - Bandwidth = 10Mb
  - qInternet - Bandwidth = 10Mb / UL = 10Mb / LS = 10Mb
    -qHighest - LS = 15%
    -qACK - LS = 20%
    -qHigh - LS = 15%
    -qMedium - LS = 20%
    -qDefault - LS = 20% (default)
    -qLow - LS = 8%
    -qLowest - LS = 2%
LAN - Bandwidth =1Gb
  - qInternet - Bandwidth = 125Mb / UL = 125Mb / LS = 125Mb
    -qHighest - LS = 15%
    -qACK - LS = 20%
    -qHigh - LS = 15%
    -qMedium - LS = 20%
    -qDefault - LS = 20%
    -qLow - LS = 8%
    -qLowest - LS = 2%
  - qLink - Bandwidth = 875Mb / UL  = 1Gb / LS = 875Mb (default)

(Crossing my fingers I'm headed in the right direction!) Thanks guys!

[georgeman]

Looks pretty much OK.

Not really a need to set UL on qLink, and I would still enforce the limit on qInternet on WAN and set the interface to the physical interface speed (so the limits are always in the same place, if you have to raise the limit in the future you will forget that it's set as well on the interface and will end up debugging this)

Tell us how it goes!

[Harvy66]

I agree with georgeman. Nothing wrong stands out.

[1activegeek]

Thanks all for the help. I've set accordingly and I think it's working as expected. Now the hard part, getting everything classed into the right queues!

[mastermindsos]

Could someone help me out please.
I followed the guide made by georgeman.
I have created these identical setup for my traffic shaper.

But I am stuck at the Floating rule.
I do not know how to create it.

I think something is wrong somewhere in the rule because when I monitored the Queue (while web browsing), the connection did not fall into the right category, instead it went into qLink which is made Default.

Also, how do I create Floating rule for the traffic shaper of LAN?
I have limited knowledge with networking and new with pfsense.
I would like to learn, please guide me. Thank you.

[georgeman]

You have set destination as "WAN net". That's just the subnet where your WAN interface resides.

What I suggested I think is to set destination "! WAN net" (not WAN net), that means every non local destination.

[mastermindsos]

Thanks for the feedback.
I do not follow you. Could you please point me?

[georgeman]

Check "invert match"

You want the rule to match everything but the WAN subnet

Or for the sake of simplicity, just select ANY. It won't make much difference. I suggest you go over this thread since the beginning if you want to understand why and how it works

[Harvy66]

I just set my floating to any/any (src/dst) and assign them directly to the WAN interface for both in/out.

[xbipin]

well i was reading this long thread, i have tried HFSC in very old versions of pfsense but then noticed it doesnt work like CBQ, basically what i wanted was suppose there is a 10MB download line and some1 is using all of it up with torrents and then a second person would like to to surf or download a single file from a site then i wanted pfsense to reduce the torrent speed and give more bandwidth to the file download as http traffic being on higher priority then p2p and when that was complete resume speed of p2p. Now i tried to achieve this using HFSC but it wasnt possible and at that time i was told HFSC is only good or comes in effect only when the internet line is saturated and doesnt kick in if it isnt saturated compared to CBQ which is active always as it borrows from other queues.

All this i had done when internet speeds were like 1Mbps or lower but now its 20Mb+ so no idea how it still works but since then im on CBQ and works well for me in situations when other higher priority queues like surfing and voip can starve p2p when they have traffic and then later give p2p full bandwidth. My aim was to only prioritize traffic rather than set a speed limit on them and CBQ works well for that but i noticed the latest pfsense doesnt have a tick box to enable borrow on a queue even though its there in the config.

let me know if HFSC can still be made to run like CBQ as i would be interested in trying if its possible