Traffic shaping confusing me with it's behavior….
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I've recently switched to pfsense (a few months ago) and had used the wizard to create some traffic shaping rules per default values. I never really noticed much wrong until I started poking around seriously and doing bandwidth tests etc. Now I'm just confused, so I'll start with my setup and then explain the issue.
My setup is as follows:
[Simple 50 meg down/ 5 up link WAN. (Time Warner Cable).
A normal "LAN" network.
A "Wifi guest" network. (For segregation.)In the future I may add an additional network to segregate out data, but most of my items live in the normal LAN and the guest is rarely if ever used but I want to have it covered in case someone with a compromised laptop comes over etc.
My needs of priority and bandwidth allocation are:
HIGH- Voip, Gaming (Particularly one PC in general as 95% of all gaming occurs only on that PC and very little else occurs there.)
Normal- Everything else that isn't specifically mentioned and has a rule created for it.
Low - p2p, usenet downloads, butt backup machine etc.I tried using the traffic shaping wizard with SIngle wan, 2 lan.
Upstream traffic seems to be properly filtered with my floating rules and butt backups, etc all seem to hit the lower priority queue and never really "impact" me too much.
Downstream seems fine for most devices not specifically assgined into a queue. Here's where things get funky.
If I place my gaming PC into the "qGames" queue, my bandwidth allocation actually drops both upstream/downstream even though it has higher priority than almost everything else. It has a default linkshare of 19.882% (per the wizard) but my understanding is unless something is using the bandwidth, it will always be available. Only when there is contention will it apply linkshare….
It's a significant drop too. My speedtest goes from being roughly 50 down 4.67 up or so to... 20ish down (maybe 30?) and 3 something up.
This is an issue because I want this machine to pretty much suck up all the available downstream/upstream for the majority of its traffic except anything filtered out with a rule into one of the lower priority queues. (I do livestreaming, and other bandwidth sensitive activities.)
I for the life of me staring at the generated rules understand how I get better speeds and more allocation of bandwidth if I let it fall into the default "qLink" rule vs having it dedicated into the qGames rule.
Should I be using the wizard for this? Is my ruleset too complex? I've read everything I could and I don't quite understand how simply being in the qGames queue vs the qLink queue is killing it so badly when there's no other downstream traffic.
Perhaps I need to just simplify and create a few basic queues? What do you guys suggest? I am a "keep it simple stupid" kind of guy, so I feel the default queue setup may be overly done. This is probably the only item really making me regret my switch from DD-wrt on an asus. :)
EDIT: Cleared everything and made a few basic queues to do basic testing with.
Here's the oddities. If I set LAN with a 50Mb/s bandwidth setting, and a normal queue with just a basic priority (no linkshare/etc), I cap out at 37Mbit/s downstream. If I run speedtest without any queueing, my max bandwidth is reported as "56mbit" roughly (higher than what i am sold but hey!). If I change the interface value from 50Mb/s to 57Mb/s, my speed jumps to 48 Mbit/s with the queue enabled.
This makes no sense to me. :(
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Is there something funky with the queue bandwidth limitations? (Ie, set the bandwidth for an interface to 50 Mb) ?
I've been playing with downstream's queue options (my lan interface's queue options) If I set it to 50Mb/s it hits around 37 Mbs. if I set it to 56 it gets around 47mbs. If I set it for 58 and 59 respectively ,It caps out further without killing my connection (latency etc) (best result so far is 51mbs)
If I set to 60.. it somehow spikes to 56+ mbs and i begin to have latency due to filling my pipe. It's a bit curious how small increments prior to 60mbs settings didn't change it much, but setting it to 60 and the entire thing blows up. haha.