Network issues during LAN party
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I need help troubleshooting a slow network experience my friends and I had at a LAN party I hosted. It was the first one I've hosted at my new house and current network setup, but I've hosted many in the past without issue. I have Comcast gigabit (1200 down/35 up) and the network was a pfSense router (HP t730 - quad-core, 8GB RAM, HP NC365T NIC) to 8 port switch to 16 port switch where the ~12 PCs were setup. Some people were using wifi. We had no issues if we were just playing locally, but any game with almost any number of people playing online resulted in lots of rubber banding or big freezes in game. We were even still having issues when it was just 3 of us left at the house playing with two randoms online against bots in Heroes of the Storm. Speedtests and downloads were fine.
Is the 35 Mbps upload speed making this not possible? In the past that's never been an issue. We even had a LAN at a cabin last year with horrendous internet. Updating/downloading games was impossible, but we were able to play online without issue.
I got some feedback on reddit that said it might be related traffic shaping, QoS, buffer bloat, or queueing. I didn't make any changes to pfSense beyond getting it up and running really. I'm surprised if it can't handle the traffic by default when a basic off the shelf router can no problem. Is there a good go-to config to get this working well? I'm not a big tinkerer when it comes to this. I just have a basic single LAN network, but wanted good performance.
My normal network config doesn't include that 8 port switch, but I had to swap that in to get the right number of ports. I thought maybe it was doing something bad, but that probably would have affected the local games too. I don't really know what to look for or how to recreate this unless I get people back over here. I want to figure it out before the next one in a month obviously. Thanks for your ideas.
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@kingkapalone dslreports.com speed test will show bufferbloat iirc. 1200/35 is pretty asymmetric. Does a full speed download fill the upload with ACKs?
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@steveits Here's the report. It got an A. http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/69231642
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That's through pfSense? Hard to argue with that result, looks good.
So to be clear this was the first time hosting on this connection?
Is the connection type different to the previous location?
Same pfSense device?
Were the games reporting good connections?
Steve
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@stephenw10 Yeah that was through my desktop wired to the 16 port switch, to the pfSense box. No other traffic on the network at the time except for maybe incidental stuff. Yes this was the first time hosting a LAN at this house with this connection.
The most recent previous LAN was at a family friend's lake cabin and I think it was 35/35 fiber using a regular Nighthawk router. It was too slow to download any games but the connection was stable when playing. We've also had small LANs at another friend's house that has probably 150/35 Xfinity cable using a basic Linksys router. We've also had many 10-12 person LANs with similar connections and setups without any issues or network tweaking.
Don't know if the games were reporting good connections, but they were unplayable due to lag. We were all experiencing it at times playing online in Killing Floor 2 or Titanfall 2. There was another time when 3 people were trying to play Apex Legends online which lagged too much while the rest of us were only playing a locally hosted game of Left 4 Dead. Then as I mentioned in the post, there were only three of us left at the end of the party playing Heroes of the Storm online and it would get laggy.
Some reddit posts thought that some people left torrents open, but I don't think anyone torrents anything and I know 100% that the two other guys who were there when it was just us three don't.
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Ah, so this was the first time playing behind pfSense?
By far most common problem for any sort of gaming is the way pfSense applies outbound NAT. That is especially true for multiple clients connecting to the same game where they all try to use the same ports.
It's more of a problem for console gaming but it seems most games rely on UPnP to setup port forwards and pfSense does not (yet) support some of the modes required for multiple clients to all request the same port.
Did you have UPnP enabled? It's disabled by default and most SOHO devices just enable everything to reduce support calls.You might have been seeing those clients falling back to a proxied connection mode which is normally far slower that connecting directly via port forwards.
Steve
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@stephenw10 correct, first LAN party using pfSense. I play plenty of games with just me on the network or I've had one other friend over at a time with a laptop.
I looked now and UPnP is disabled. I've really made no changes to pfSense other than getting it setup and installing a few more packages. I should enable it and then Allow UPnP Port Mapping?
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You should if the games you're playing require inbound ports. I would expect the game to have some sort of network status diagnostic. Since you seem not to be using consoles you cannot use the included test functions they have.
Those are the two biggest differences between pfSense and SOHO devices:
UPnP disabled by default.
Outbound NAT uses source port randomisation.See: https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/recipes/games.html
Steve
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@stephenw10 thanks, I'm going to see if a friend can come over with his laptop so we can get two PCs plus my PS5 going at once and see what happens as a rudimentary test.
I also setup this based on a reddit response I got to this topic: https://www.pimdegreef.nl/bufferbloat-solution-for-pfsense/
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Was your dslreports result above with that shaping in place? It looks pretty good.
Steve
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@stephenw10 no it was from before I made any changes. The report after I made the changes was also an A, but I'm not sure if that's because it's just me on one PC and not hosting a LAN.
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The test there deliberately loads up the connection to a known amount so I would expect it to give a good indication even if you are the user at that time.
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Not seeing anything glaring, but there are a few questions:
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That HP t730 appears to have a Realtek NIC, is that in play at all, or are both WAN and LAN plugged into the HP NC365T NIC?
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I hate to assume, so I'll just ask... is PFsense running on bare metal or virtualized?
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If go to Status -> Interfaces, are there any "In/out errors" on your interfaces?
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Any chance you glanced at the link lights on your switches while the issues presented themselves? Any strange light patterns? (e.g. all lights solid, all lights blinking at the same rate, etc)
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Did you happen to peek at your bandwidth usage during the issues? Any chance someone tagged several torrents and left them to seed?
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What packages are you running?
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What model switches are you using? How confident are you about their health?
A few things I would do:
- From what I gather, that HP t730 is a Thin Client PC running a laptop CPU. The specs appear to be "ok" at face value... I guess... however, considering thin clients are cheap low-performance computers by design... you may want to entertain different hardware.
- Given your bandwidth, I personally don't think you need QoS unless you routinely saturate your upload bandwidth. If you're not using it, I'd re-verify nothing's configured. If you are using it and have been tweaking various settings along the way, I would blow it away and re-run the wizard.
- I personally would take that 8 port switch out of the mix to remove a point of failure... and just run a longer cable to the 16 port switch (assuming it's functioning properly). If 16 ports aren't enough, install a 24 port unit.
- As always, I'd check your cables. I'd also replace any custom cables with prefabbed CAT6.
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An update since we had the LAN. The only change I made was enabling UPnP and everything worked fine. No lag in any of the games we played for the 8 of us in attendance. Thanks again!
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Nice. Thanks for the update.