Lots of dropped packets on outgoing ACK + Ping dropouts

[britcowboy]

Hi All,

I'm relatively new to pfSense, but I'm always eager to learn new things being a computer enthusiast and software developer, and I've been reading loads of guides and think I mostly understand how things work for the most part anyway!

I've got traffic shaping working, and it seems to be working relatively well.

I don't use m1 or d at this time, so all the values below are m2 values

WAN
qAck - RT: 20% LS: 20%
qDefault
qP2P - LS: 1%
qGames - (disabled at the moment but was) RS+LS: 20%
qOthersHigh - LS: 20%
qOthersLow - LS: 5%
qCrashplanUp - LS:1%
LAN
qLink - B/W: 20%
qInternet - BW/UL/LS: 17000Kbit/s
 qACK - RT/LS: 20%
 qP2P - LS: 1Kb
 qGames - LS: 20%
 qOthersHigh - RT: 25% LS: 40%
 qOthersLow - LS: 5%
 qCrashplan - LS: 1%
 qUsenet - LS:5%

However, monitoring the queues, I see lots of dropped packets on my Outgoing ACK queue (the queue under the WAN interface), from what I've read this is bad! I'm on an ADSL connection, around 18mbps down - it varies of course and 0.3mbps up, and I've set the ACK queue to have a real time bandwidth of 20%, and link share of 20% - but I have fiddled with it at times putting it up to 50%. But I always get drops. I've tried increasing the queue size (and eventually I can get dropped packets to 0), but monitoring my throughput, I seem to get more choppy up and down throughput doing that, and an overall less speed.

Am I doing something wrong?

Also, I've noticed that if I do PING commands during a big download, it has a few timeouts, is this something to be concerned about do you think? I've added ICMP to my high priority queue to try and combat this, but still some don't get a response.

Last question, I assume this is just a side effect of the way traffic shaping works (by dropping packets etc), but I've noticed that with traffic shaping off, yes the speed is higher as expected, but the graph is more flat lined at the higher rate, where as with traffic shaping on, it's a bit more 'spikey' with it looking more unstable. Is my assumption correct?

Thanks in advance :)