Trafic shaping for Streaming to twitch as well as streaming Netflix/YouTube
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Correct those are different queues within the ALTQ shaper.
pfSense uses two basic types of traffic shaping, ALTQ & Dummynet (dummynet is under the "Limiters" tab).
ALTQ is what your screenshot is of. It is very effective, but you need to know what you are doing and even then it takes time to enter all of your queues.
Dummynet is very simple, you just make two limiters. One for Download, the other for Upload.
Set a queue within each limiter, set your subnet mask (probably /24) - ask if oyu need help with any of the other settings, there aren't many).
You would limit both of these streams to some value slightly less than the slowest your internet ever gets.
This is the step that most people mess up with traffic shaping - because no one wants to do it.But, put simply - your internet bandwidth is a series of funnels. For simplicity we'll just say there are two funnels - you and your ISP (there are more). If your funnel is larger than your ISP's, then your ISP funnel will limit your traffic - probably not in the way that it best for you.
If you want control over how your traffic is limited then you MUST make your funnel smaller than your ISP's - therefore you MUST limit your bandwidth to less than the slowest it EVER gets.
What this means is - if you pay for a 50Mbps down / 10 Mbps up line, but during peak traffic you are actually only getting 40/8, then you would set your limiters to 38,000Kbps / 7,600Kbps. If you decided to just set it to something like 49,000Kbps/9,000Kbps, then the limiters would do nothing for you during peak hours (when it matters most).Once the dummynet limiters are created, you just apply them to your firewall rules in the advanced section of each rule and you are done.
You can use dummynet in pre 2.4.x, but you can't use fq_codel. I recommend using 2.4.0 (the Release version comes out tomorrow). Because you can set your dummynet to use fq_codel with the CLI and shellcmd package.
fq_codel is just a very good algorithm that is exceptional at fairly sharing your bandwidth and greatly reducing latency at the same time. So it will generally solve all of your problems without a whole bunch of config.
If you don't want to go that way, I recommend you watch this video on traffic shaping. It will show you how it works so you know what you are doing. After watching that you'll at least know what questions to ask. After watching that you'll probably also see why I recommend you just use dummynet for a home network that is simply trying to upload and download video content without bufferbloat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF46PNid1Mo
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Thank you sir! Story of my life. Here i am doing the advanced S*** where the next tab over is the thing I need that will work and be ok. LOL
Thanks man.
I will try this and I will also putts around learning with AltQ. -
Anytime!
Please ask if you have any other questions.
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Correct those are different queues within the ALTQ shaper.
pfSense uses two basic types of traffic shaping, ALTQ & Dummynet (dummynet is under the "Limiters" tab).
ALTQ is what your screenshot is of. It is very effective, but you need to know what you are doing and even then it takes time to enter all of your queues.
Dummynet is very simple, you just make two limiters. One for Download, the other for Upload.
Set a queue within each limiter, set your subnet mask (probably /24) - ask if oyu need help with any of the other settings, there aren't many).
You would limit both of these streams to some value slightly less than the slowest your internet ever gets.
This is the step that most people mess up with traffic shaping - because no one wants to do it.But, put simply - your internet bandwidth is a series of funnels. For simplicity we'll just say there are two funnels - you and your ISP (there are more). If your funnel is larger than your ISP's, then your ISP funnel will limit your traffic - probably not in the way that it best for you.
If you want control over how your traffic is limited then you MUST make your funnel smaller than your ISP's - therefore you MUST limit your bandwidth to less than the slowest it EVER gets.
What this means is - if you pay for a 50Mbps down / 10 Mbps up line, but during peak traffic you are actually only getting 40/8, then you would set your limiters to 38,000Kbps / 7,600Kbps. If you decided to just set it to something like 49,000Kbps/9,000Kbps, then the limiters would do nothing for you during peak hours (when it matters most).Once the dummynet limiters are created, you just apply them to your firewall rules in the advanced section of each rule and you are done.
You can use dummynet in pre 2.4.x, but you can't use fq_codel. I recommend using 2.4.0 (the Release version comes out tomorrow). Because you can set your dummynet to use fq_codel with the CLI and shellcmd package.
fq_codel is just a very good algorithm that is exceptional at fairly sharing your bandwidth and greatly reducing latency at the same time. So it will generally solve all of your problems without a whole bunch of config.
If you don't want to go that way, I recommend you watch this video on traffic shaping. It will show you how it works so you know what you are doing. After watching that you'll at least know what questions to ask. After watching that you'll probably also see why I recommend you just use dummynet for a home network that is simply trying to upload and download video content without bufferbloat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF46PNid1Mo
Now by setting these things slower than my actual aren't I effectively bottlenecking my own internet? Also, the lingo for these limiters; for the destination tab - source is down while destination means up? (see attachment)
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Down is destination
Up is source
Yes, you have to be your own bottleneck otherwise an upstream router will be queueing your traffic
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Kind of like this?
And what more options are there?I get 90 up and 25 down.
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The opposite of that, downstream is destination, upstream is source
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Lol
That IS how I had it saved, Don't know why i screenshot it that way. I was more so asking about the funnels. -
Funnels as in your bandwidth limits?
That depends very much on your personal connection.
Some people have WAN connections that are rock solid i.e., they pay for say 100/100 FiOS service, and actually get 100/100 or better 99%+ of the time. If that's you then you could safely set your bandwidth limits to 95%+ of your advertised bandwidth.
Most people's connection would be some cable or dsl connection - let's say 50/10. During non-peak hours when everyon's at work, they actually get 50/10 or slightly better. But when everyone comes home from work they get something more like 48/9. Then in the evenings when everyone is streaming netflix, etc. they get something like 38/6.5.
If this is you, then you would take the worst of those connections (38/6.5) and set your limits to maybe 95% of that, or 36,100Kbps/6,175Kbps. Then you have to live with cutting your internet connection down by 28%down/35%up all of the time just because your ISP sucks.
-This is what all the stuff in my signature is trying to avoid.So, if you've accounted for that then you are good to go. But you have to measure your own network at different times, no one on here can accurately tell you exactly what to set it at.
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