R7000 downstream QOS?

[Carnagerover]

Hi all,

I am in the process of setting up a R7000 for a family friend, looks like a really nice piece of kit, one of the main reasons this was purchased was due to the QOS settings. However the internet connection in the house is;

120Mbps down
25Mbps upload

Does the QOS work on both wired and wireless devices? I did enable it at first but it looked like it may be causing some download speed loss even though the computer that was downloading was the only active connection. With this sort of Internet speed is there a point in having QOS on? I think the idea is to ensure video streaming to iPads stays number 1 priority in the house but not at a massive cost to download speed?

 

[TonyH]

Hi,
I played with QOS again after flashing with latest f/w just released few days ago. I ended up turning them off. QOS was no good and then good, and no good again it seems like. Like you mentioned, my ISP speed is 50/3, with QOS on, it drops to 30/2-ish no matter how I set it up. Also it affects ping time too I noticed.

 

[Carnagerover]

Hi,
I played with QOS again after flashing with latest f/w just released few days ago. I ended up turning them off. QOS was no good and then good, and no good again it seems like. Like you mentioned, my ISP speed is 50/3, with QOS on, it drops to 30/2-ish n matter how I set it up. Also it affects ping time too I noticed.

I just tried my local ping test and I am not currently seeing a difference, the ping remains at 10ms to BBC.co.uk which is the normal ping on this connection.

I suppose it shouldn't matter how fat your downstream pipe is the principles the same, all that you really want from this sort of QOS is priority for your video streaming so that if others are downloading its not at the cost of other users in the house.

 

[azazel1024]

It would be nice to see better QoS for routers. It looks like some companies are starting to make the attempt. I've personally never messed with it as I haven't had WAN traffic impact game latency or video streaming before (I have a 75/35 FIOS connection). Even if the QoS was simply as "stupid" as setting a "reserved" bandwidth for different IPs on the local network or something. QoS rule would then be that that IP gets priority on up to the set bandwidth and then be able to set a list of IPs and their priority ranking.

I realize that could mean that streaming video on your desktop might not get any more priority, but a lot of people have streaming setups for their TVs, or use just one device for most of their video streaming, or they want to reserve a certain portion for their desktop for gaming or something else. That could accomplish that if it was even mildly intelligent.

So I set 4Mbps reserved for my Apple TV so that Netflix never gets screwed up (from my own WAN activities) and maybe set aside the same 4Mbps for a streaming box I have in the basement and then set 2Mbps reserved for my desktop, because sometimes I do gaming on it. Then I let everything else be wild west.

Those other devices aren't using any bandwidth, great, everything is up for grabs, but that Apple TV starts trying to pull data, it gets bumped to the front of the line and the router makes sure it has up to 4Mbps of bandwidth if it wants it.

 

[Carnagerover]

I have put Kong build DD-WRT on the router to try the QOS on there, basically there are 2 iPads a PS4 and a gaming PC.

If I just prioritize the above into premium priority and then just leave the rest of the houses devices to fall into the standard priority to ensure these the main focus are going to play nice.

 

[remixedcat]

I would love to see a consumer grade router ever have as good QoS as a Cisco Meraki. Those have awesome QoS controls

 

[L&LD]

I would love to see a consumer grade router ever have as good QoS as a Cisco Meraki. Those have awesome QoS controls

I would love a Cisco Meraki to have an awesome price like a consumer router does (even the most expensive one is awesome in comparison).


http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j...uIG4DQ&usg=AFQjCNFUCTBh8Yh8-Rt53W5wAD23R1kfmg

 

[remixedcat]

The Z1 has the same QoS and it's the price of a higher end consumer grade router:

I also reviewed it:
http://remixedcat.blogspot.com/2014/02/cisco-meraki-z1-review.html

I just wish the Z1 had upgradeable antennas, as the range wasn't the best.

 

[Carnagerover]

Bringing this back to my original question,

Now that I have put the DD-WRT on the Nighthawk instead of using Mac Priority could I just use the;

Prioritize small TCP packets with the following flags

ACK SYN FIN RST

I am assuming this would be good for gaming purposes but would this also work for video as well?

 

[Razor512]

If your concern is Max throughput, then do not use QOS. On DD-WRT, the routing performance, as well as the overhead from QOS are not as good as that of the stock firmware.

On dd-wrt the the speeds are significant slower because they do not have full access to the needed source code, and thus in order to implement many of the QOS and other more advanced routing features (above what the stock firmware offers), they must use a less accelerated method which has a massive CPU overhead, thus making even 200mbit throughput difficult.

Furthermore, many companies and open 3rd party firmware devs, do not fully detail how the QOS manages the bandwidth. All of them will slow your connection if you enter in your benchmarked speed. Some go as far as to cap you to 90% of what ever speed you entered, and thus your connection is slower 100% of the time, in order to avoid congestion issues that a fast connection may only face 5% of the time.

No one seems to have developed a QOS that will allow the connection to reach its full throughput, but still prioritize different traffic types or devices effectively.

Even worst, some QOS rules will stay in effect 100% of the time depending on the firmware, thus causing connections to be unnecessarily capped. For some reason the router based QOS does not offer a simple and nearly perfect priority based sharing such as what is experiences with setting a process priority in task manager.

Generally when you give something a lower priority, if the connection is idle, then the low priority process should have access to 100% of the bandwidth, but the moment a higher priority connection is made, then it should allow that connection to take as much as it can, and throttle the lower priority connection, up until a limit set by the user (for example FTP can be set to low priority, but have a lower limit of 20% where a higher priority process can eat up as much throughput as it wants up until there is 20% remaining if the low priority traffic is also fighting for full use of the available throughput, and if many rules are in place and the lower limits add up to over 100%, then those connections should enter into a mode where an overall lower limit is shared equally between all rules in the priority level.
That is the ideal that I would like (functioning similar to task manager where all priorities have access to 100% of the CPU), but sadly, QOS does not offer that.

After you get past a slower connection like 1-7mbit where most tasks will saturate the connection, a consumer connection does not really need QOS.

 

[RogerSC]

On dd-wrt the the speeds are significant slower because they do not have full access to the needed source code, and thus in order to implement many of the QOS and other more advanced routing features (above what the stock firmware offers), they must use a less accelerated method which has a massive CPU overhead, thus making even 200mbit throughput difficult.

I don't use QOS, but with dd-wrt, one thing that can help CPU overhead is that a lot of people say that they are overclocking their R7000's at 1200/800 or 1400/800 (CPU clock/memory clock), and not seeing overheating. That raises the CPU ceiling a bit *smile*. If I wanted to use QOS, dd-wrt is what I'd play with, personally, since I've read in the dd-wrt forum that QOS on that firmware actually works.

But like I said, I don't have any need to use it.

 

[Razor512]

yep, dd-wrt has pretty good QOS, but it is only practical on slower connections due to the performance issues. But then again there is not much of a need to use it with a fast connection since when set up, QOS slows your connection down a little, basically giving up 5-10% of your connection speed 100% of the time in order to avoid certain congestion issues that may only happen 5% or less of the time.

For me, at most I would only use the QOS on these routers if it were tied to a button, for example pressing the WPS button can instead turn QOS on and off. Other than that, it is just not convenient to have it on, even if your connection speed falls below the CPU bottleneck.

 

[Carnagerover]

Totally understand what everyone is saying on here and just want to say thanks for the replies

Like what has been mentioned by others it seems that QOS costs more in reduced bandwidth than you gain for that odd time where someone is downloading while others are streaming video. QOS just doesn't seem reliable enough to warrant the cost.

Basically we are just going for man made QOS in the house, no uploading to the cloud at peak times in the house. Lastly downloading is only done on one machine and that has been set to leave some room for others that my be streaming video or playing online.