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Traffic shaping and ADSL

  • 22-08-2004 1:36pm
    #1
    MadKevo
    Closed Accounts Posts: 191 ✭✭


    Hi all,
    a few months ago I implemented a m0n0wall firewall on an old PC and configured it to prioritise small TCP packets (0-80 bytes), HTTP upstream and ICMP traffic over other traffic types to see what would happen. The results were amazing and I'd like to share them with you as it may help some of you get your asymmetrical broadband access back to the advertised speeds again!
    It may be of particular interest to online gamers to get those lags minimised.

    I'm on a 2Mbps/256kb/s service outside the state, and for the purposes of comparing before and afters I used UTV's Speedtest to benchmark the download speed and pings to the first hop in my ISP's network for the pings.

    Downloading while Uploading:
    While uploading, especially with <cough> p-p traffic, download speeds drop off if TCP ACKs are not given precedence over other traffic (particularly large packets being uploaded).
    Before using m0n0wall I was getting 1.8Mb/s download speeds while not uploading, going down to about 600kb/s while saturating the upstream using BitTorrent's upload speed controls. After m0nowall, download speeds didn't drop off until the upstream was saturated, and then only to 1.7Mb/s.

    Pings.
    A similar story to report with pings, but would probably be applicable to online game traffic too.
    Before m0n0wall was getting about 12ms to the ISP router with no uploads, dropping to 1200+ms when saturating the upstream. Not good!
    After m0n0wall, the ping to the ISP reamined about the same with no upload (as you would expect), but the average ping time dropped to about 98ms when saturating the upstream. A big improvement.

    HTTP Traffic
    A big complaint from others in the house was that the web was grinding to a halt while uploading. Prioritising HTTP and HTTPS traffic upstream fixed all that, with the web's response remaining/feeling snappy whatever traffic was going upstream.

    Of course, we can only influence the upstream path, not having direct control over the downstream, but some pretty dramatic results can be optained.
    See the attached pictures for graphed results for pings and download speeds - sorry for the mix of bits 'n' bytes!

    If anyone's interested I can post screenshots of the m0n0wall config. I'm running the latest beta load by the way, solid as a rock.
    Release 1.1 has just (Sunday) gone final, so this would be the one to use.
    /MK


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