So... you've probably noticed that when downloading a game or doing serious p2p piracy, your internet latency suffers: websites take longer to load, video chats stutter, online games glitch.
Well, good news! You can do something about that if you have a router capable of running the free OpenWrt firmware.
The problem of downloads (or uploads) clogging up the pipes is called bufferbloat. Basically, there's a traffic jam somewhere, usually where your ISP throttles your internet speed. This means data packets have to queue up behind whatever data is clogging up the pipes, and so they get delivered with a noticeable latency.
Some boffins have looked at that and identified ways to improve the situation:
- Have shorter buffers, so stuff cannot queue up as much.
- Create express lanes where other traffic can skip the queue of Final Fantasy asset deliveries.
- Tell the Final Fantasy asset delivery service to slow the fuck down.
Unfortunately, the queuing policy and the size of the buffers coming into your home is controlled by the ISP, so you can't really do much about that, but you can actually do #3.
This works by setting a speed limit on the OpenWrt router in your home, which tells anyone sending too much shit your way to slow down, which means the buffer on the ISPs side never get full, and therefore no traffic jam! You won't even notice you're downloading Final Fantasy. The web browsing and video chatting will feel like there's no download going on at all. You got to set the bandwidth limit 10-20% below your actual internet speed though, which I think is well worth it.
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/sqm
Anyone had success doing this in OpnSense/pfSense? I tried following a guide when I first set up OpnSense, but the changes made my bufferbloat rating worse, so I reversed the changes and haven't tried since.
Btw there is this test you can use to test buffer bloat: https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat
And you probably want to test it using a wired connection first.
Traffic shaping eats up CPU, maybe your router's CPU wasn't fast enough for this? Apparently mine has a dual-core 880 MHz MIPS.
I bought a N5105 mini pc (Intel, 4 cores) from AliExpress to home-roll my own router, with the idea that I could run a few other services in containers on the same device. I think hardware-wise I'm ok, but since I built it from scratch, it's possible something isn't optimal how I configured the software. But this thing should be able to do gigabit speeds no problem. Maybe I'll try again next weekend. Thanks for the inspiration and glad you were able to resolve the buffer bloat!
Oh yeah that thing should be way faster.