Should i improve my BufferBloat score

michmoor

Never went down this road before because its never been a thing i cared about but today i decided to explore this out of curiosity.
Buffer bloat... Below are my results.
I got a 500/500 line. If the highest grade is an A+ is it generally worth it? I know i probably wont see much benefit except if my kid is playing COD but curious about some feedback here.

Thoughts?

johnpoz

@michmoor I would wonder if you have 500/500 line why your only seeing 282 up? Sorry but unless your wanting to download some linux ios at the same time your kid is gaming and you want to be nice you got nothing to worry about there.

But I would be concerned with being 56% of what your paying on your upload side.

If your really 500/250 your killing it..

Bufferbloat is rarely an issue, and these tests can be misleading for sure.

michmoor

@johnpoz The upload is varied. I run the same these i get a higher bandwidth report for upload. I got to speedtest.net and its over 600 symmetrical.
That said, yeah i don't think my use case of heavy uploads is a problem. I was curious of feedback relating to the score so thank you for that.

That said, i shall ignore, haha

bmeeks

My understanding is that buffer bloat is a bigger problem on wildly asymmetrical connections (that is, where the upload speed is an order of magnitude or more less than the download speed). For example, a cable modem with 1 Gig download but only 50 megabits/sec upload (that's what I formerly had), or a DSL connection with 6 or 10 meg download but only 1 meg or less upload.

It should rarely be an issue on fully symmetrical connections. In my opinion, if you have symmetrical upload/download speeds, then I would not worry about buffer bloat. Any times it might manifest would be very brief. The various test websites would have you believe that it is endemic and a huge problem. The reality is a bit different in my view .

I have a 1 Gig/1 Gig fiber to the home connection and buffer bloat is not a problem at all for me. Even when I had the older cable modem with 1 Gig down and 50 meg up, and I experimented with buffer bloat mitigation, I could find absolutely no difference in real world performance (other than it did slow down my download by a bit) when buffer bloat shapers were in place in pfSense. By "real world" I mean regular Internet activity outside of the special buffer bloat test websites.

Bob.Dig

@michmoor said in Should i improve my BufferBloat score:

I got to speedtest.net and its over 600 symmetrical.

Then use speedtest.net as BufferBloat test. It will show your pings at load as well.

mcury

I used it for a while with a 500/200 fiber connection, but my floating rule was only for the following ports: 27000 to 27050 UDP.
These ports are for Counter Strike, and I can say that I became a killing machine in that game.
I don't know how many times people said that I was cheating...

But latency didn't improve in the game, so I'm not sure if it was some kind of placebo effect or if it was really working.