Setting up Router Quality of Service - does it help?

[RedKestrel]

Hello all,

 

While my Internet situation has been much improved over the last couple years, as lots of people move into my rural area and try to work from home my bandwidth has taken a nosedive at key times once again.

It wouldn't be a problem if I was the only one on my Internet, but usually someone else is watching videos or browsing, and when the bandwidth drops I get disconnected. Usually, as per Murphy's Law, just when I'm finishing up a rare good sortie. Luckily my stats are so bad that I don't think anyone believes I am discoing to prevent being shot down!

Looking at ways to make sure this doesn't happen, I've read up on enabling Quality of Service (QoS) on the router to make sure that it prioritizes certain kinds of data. Does anyone have experience with this? Did they notice if it helped at all? And any guides to follow or settings that worked for people would be great.

 

Thanks!

[LLv34_Temuri]

On 12/16/2020 at 5:02 PM, RedKestrel said:

Looking at ways to make sure this doesn't happen, I've read up on enabling Quality of Service (QoS) on the router to make sure that it prioritizes certain kinds of data. Does anyone have experience with this?

I have a crappy 8/0,7 ADSL at home, so I set my home router to prioritize UDP traffic. Might be just a feeling, but I think it did help with the random disconnections.

[RedKestrel]

Resurrecting this thread as recently my disconnect woes have gotten worse, again. I'm going to document the things I try and the results I get here hoping for feedback, or if I find something that works I can help other people dealing with the same issue. 

I have played around with some QOS settings but they don't seem to make much in the way of difference, but I am not sure I'm doing it right. I will post some screenshots of my setup when I am back at my home computer.

One thing I found was when testing my connection with the CombatBox server, I was getting sometimes significant packet loss. I have followed their instructions on reducing MTU size to minimize fragmentation but found that from test to test last night the required MTU to have no fragmentation kept dropping. 

 

It may very well be that this is an issue with my internet service and therefore impossible to rectify.

 

My next step is to isolate the cause of the packet loss. If it's at the router, then I will replace that and see what happens. If not, I guess I talk to my ISP and see if there is anything to be done, but since it is tower wireless there is probably no action that can be taken. Unless I decide to go with Starlink, lol. 

[RedKestrel]

OK, so I tried to take some screen shots but got too lazy to sanitize them for network info so here goes.

I have the priorities set for QOS to be Highest - 100% minimum reserved bandwidth, then High at 80, Medium at 60, Low at 40, and Lowest at 20%. In theory, if my upload bandwidth drops too low to support all the connections, those protocols marked "highest" should get sent no matter how little bandwidth there is (unless there is 0, obviously).

For the protocol section, I ranked the TCP/UDP from port 28000 from my desktop computer, and the TCP/UDP from Port 28100 from my desktop computer as the Highest priority, followed by everything else from my PC at the High priority. I believe those ports are the required ones for Il-2, but someone please correct me if I'm wrong. Browsing from elsewhere is set to high, file transfers to Medium.

The one thing I'm not sure about is this - by putting everything else from my PC at High, it might be that that rule is also encapsulating the TCP/UDP from Il-2 as well, and the router is ignoring the Highest rule in favour of the one that covers my desktop, which means all traffic from my PC has the same priority, so my voice comms might edge out my Il-2 TCP/UDP data. The manual was not clear on if this was the case - it's an Asus router but the english manual appears to have been translated and the language doesn't always make sense.

 

What I want to accomplish from this is to make sure my voice comms have reasonably high priority, while not interfering with my game connection. I'm not sure I've accomplished this. Unfortunately by the time I was done messing around last night I didn't have time to test in game.

I did manage to test a bit for dropped packets and did not find any dropped packets when pinging Combatbox or my own router, so I don't think there is a problem with the cable or the router, and maybe my connection was better today. I did still have to reduce my MTU setting to 1028 bits to avoid fragmentation, which is about 300 lower than what I had to do a few months ago. I think something has happened with my service or the route my data takes to the CB server. I'm not sure if setting my MTU this low is helping by reducing fragmentation, or harming by being too low. It's frustratingly hard to test consistently when my internet connection is so variable. 

If anyone else has insight into this or can see where may have I went wrong, let me know. 

 

 

[RedKestrel]

Well, after experimenting with QoS on or off, I can't really be sure it had any impact on my disconnections. Having it on didn't noticeably improve ping to the server.  It did not prevent the random disconnects, or if it did, did not make a big enough difference in their frequency to tell.

When the disconnects were bad, ping tests immediately afterward using the command prompt showed dropped packets to the server, but otherwise acceptable round-trip pings of 70ms or less. I believe that the random 10009 errors I get were the result of too many dropped packets, and the server believed I had killed the connection, or deemed it poor enough quality to kill it itself.

Currently I have QoS off, and things worked fine for 3 hours yesterday, including clear comms, where before SRS was crackly. 

 

I think too many of my connection issues are external to anything I have in my house - I think at least some of my issue has to do with my ISP's routing of data, which seems to change significantly every few months. I think this explains the big reduction in MTU I had to do to avoid fragmentation.

 

My solution for now is to play during off-peak times on my service when possible, and forget about QOS for the moment. Maybe at some point I will try it again, but I am not confident I have a full understanding of how or if it works properly on my router, and with that in mind I think I'm just doing more harm than good. Sorry this wasn't a more clear verdict.