Solved ax88u-pro: need adaptive qos advice for 5 adults on a 300/300 isp

[consorts]

i need some form of qos that really works, not pretty screens full of ineffective nonsense. over the years when any pc does a major os upgrade, it seems to hog all our bandwidth that knocks the vpn clients my home school and work people use offline, and then i get an earful from the wife. as a mmorpg player i want to shave 10-20% off the top my isp offer in order to improve in game latency. so now that i have this new ax88u-pro to play with, i was hoping the qos section would be more mature by now. the good news is adaptive:manual works (it just disables any qos that may be set at the guest ssid level, which is fine).

what is weird is adaptive:automatic which regulars here have been advocating for years, seems bogus, as all it does is some lame attempt to identify what you are doing (which i hate because it smells of metadata tracking) then lumping that into a category, often incorrectly. the majority of our traffic is video streaming using android smart tv's, android tv boxes, firesticks, yet that category type is empty, presumably lumped in with "network" or "learn from home", i simply can't tell at this point. i really want to just go back to using manual of 270/270 and be done with it, and stop all this categorizing nonsense with seems to be nothing short of placebo to me.

so i guess my real question is; does adaptive;manual actually work now? i know it did not 7 years ago on my ac3100 as our vpn clients were still getting choked off when any one pc had an os update that i could not throttle at the client. if manual really works, meaning no single connection can hog more than 270/270 at any one moment, then i'd rather just leave it at that. i just don't know because the hardware and firmware has evolved since my last new router install, and i have no idea now what is actually mature and working, and what is still merely marketing placebo. sorry for the rant, but i just found out most of the AiCloud section does not work reliably either, so now I worry about other Asus features I was counting on using when I bought this expensive router.

and yes,
i'm sure i could find some client agent that will qos at the client level,
(i already do this when using any p2p agent)
but i really don't want to have to deal with all that housekeeping,
as this expensive router should be doing this.

 

[dave14305]

Just use CAKE with 270/270 Mbps and call it good. Your bandwidth is modest enough to not be impacted by the required disabling of HW acceleration required by CAKE.

 

[Tech9]

but i just found out most of the AiCloud section does not work reliably either

Don't use AiCloud. Use VPN Server to connect to your network from Internet.

 

[consorts]

use CAKE 270/270 not be impacted by the required disabling of HW acceleration.

i get that i won't miss hw acceleration while using 300 of a 2,500 rated router
but why is cake any better than adaptive manual?
for fun i switched to cake as you suggest, and it does keep my client limited.

so with cake i should leave "wan packet overhead" 0,0,norm defaults alone?

 

[dave14305]

but why is cake any better than adaptive manual?

Because you said you don’t want to deal with any nonsense.

 

[consorts]

Because you said you don’t want to deal with any nonsense.

ok, thanks for the heads up, as i'm new to cake being a qos thing;

CAKEQOS/FLEXQOS Advise/Guidance/Best Practice

Hi everyone apologies if this may or may not have been mentioned on previous threads/posts I have actually tried to read lots of posts but could not quite get the answer I was looking for. I have a Asus RT-AX86U Pro and running latest MerlinWRT..I have a EE broadband FTTC ADSL2 Connection of...

www.snbforums.com

 

[heysoundude]

ok, thanks for the heads up, as i'm new to cake being a qos thing;

CAKEQOS/FLEXQOS Advise/Guidance/Best Practice

Hi everyone apologies if this may or may not have been mentioned on previous threads/posts I have actually tried to read lots of posts but could not quite get the answer I was looking for. I have a Asus RT-AX86U Pro and running latest MerlinWRT..I have a EE broadband FTTC ADSL2 Connection of...

www.snbforums.com

RTFManPage: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/tc-cake.8.html

 

[Tech9]

Based on post #6 - nothing to optimize.

 

[littlepopkaka]

I previously used the AX86 and after some experimentation, I concluded that the default configuration was optimal. I could simultaneously download at full speed on Steam and play games without issue. The performance of Cake and FlexQoS wasn't comparable to the integrated AdaptiveQoS. The only problem was its traffic classification; it sometimes failed to identify gaming traffic, preventing the QoS from being applied. In those cases, I would manually elevate the priority of "Others" to the highest level.

 

[consorts]

performance of Cake and FlexQoS wasn't comparable to the integrated AdaptiveQoS.

good to know adaptive manual may prove better than cake in some circumstances (i only gave up on adaptive when i noticed it was not classifying streaming correctly, not because it was not qos'ing). everyone in my home who regularly fast downloads big files will usually throttle it at the software client level. it's mostly when some client OS does an unexpected big upgrade (like win11 going from 23H2 to 24H2) we have a problem, so i'll wait and see if cake will suffice.

 

[degrub]

schedule the OS upgrade downloads for middle of the night.

 

[BikeHelmet]

ok, thanks for the heads up, as i'm new to cake being a qos thing;

CAKEQOS/FLEXQOS Advise/Guidance/Best Practice

Hi everyone apologies if this may or may not have been mentioned on previous threads/posts I have actually tried to read lots of posts but could not quite get the answer I was looking for. I have a Asus RT-AX86U Pro and running latest MerlinWRT..I have a EE broadband FTTC ADSL2 Connection of...

www.snbforums.com

FlexQOS works fine too, but you have to disable flowcache or things end up in the wrong categories. Flowcache is what allows you to get those insane speeds on WAN. With it turned off, you're similarly limited. (A few hundred mbit.) On every RT-AX6x router and above that I have tried, flowcache goes off or QOS is a confused mess.

I am guessing that people like littlepopkaka did not turn off flowcache over SSH. FlexQOS and Cake are far superior to the built in QOS. But again, if you don't turn off flowcache, you've got a confused mess, so in his case the Adaptive likely did work better.

With flowcache turned on, I have seen Steam downloads go into the highest priority bucket, and games go into other downloads, and streaming go into unrelated categories. It has no clue what it's doing.

Edit: If you want to tune your QOS, your planning starts by understanding subnets and grouping your related device IPs together - so that you can categorize types of devices. VOIP adapters, printers, a file download PC, etc. (this also helps with firewall rules) - then after that, figuring out if your favourite games use identifiable ports, and setting those to take priority over other traffic. A bit of legwork, but you can get something great out the other end.

Online IP CIDR / VLSM Supernet Calculator

Fully featured, professional CIDR calculator for all CIDR / VLSM calculations

www.subnet-calculator.com

192.168.1.40/30 - VOIP
192.168.1.44/30 - Printers
192.168.1.48/30 - NAS Boxes
192.168.1.64/28 - PCs
Etc.

 

[consorts]

this is all very interesting, but
where is this "flowcache" setting in the menu tree?

 

[Tech9]

where is this "flowcache" setting in the menu tree?

Doesn't exist. Enable/Disable manually in SSH only.

What are you still fixing and for what exactly reason?

 

[BikeHelmet]

this is all very interesting, but
where is this "flowcache" setting in the menu tree?

You have to enable SSH, connect in with something like PUTTY, then use commands like:

fc enable
fc disable
nvram commit

Ship something where one feature conflicts with another so that they don't work unless you turn one off? Who in their right mind would do that...

 

[Kingp1n]

If you're using FlexQoS, it does allow the option to turn FC On or Off or set to Auto under Customize --> Flow Cache Control.

Set to Off = will leave FC enabled
Set to On = will disabled FC regardless if you're using iptables rules or not
Auto = will disabled FC automatically if you're using iptables rules (required for newer HND5.04 routers)

 

[BikeHelmet]

If you're using FlexQoS, it does allow the option to turn FC On or Off or set to Auto under Customize --> Flow Cache Control.

Set to Off = will leave FC enabled
Set to On = will disabled FC regardless if you're using iptables rules or not
Auto = will disabled FC automatically if you're using iptables rules (required for newer HND5.04 routers)

Awesome! New feature that I didn't know was added.

 

[consorts]

What are you still fixing and for what exactly reason?

thanks for your concern. i'm fine eating cake, just curious to understand
what other qos is available and why some use a certain qos method.

a tangent question;
since various qos do not seem to classify "video and audio streaming"
where does the qos logic put it all? simply dumping it into "network"