For months I've been toying with the idea of changing my ISP (I'm using Virgin Fibre in London, UK) becuase I get ping times spiking up and down and other oddness like not being able to see a full list of servers and stuff, although down/upload speeds are fine.
Recently, though I've been wondering about whether my router is at least partially to blame. The other day I bumped into this site, which seems interesting:
So I ran some of the tests it reccomends to uncover "buffer bloat" (I used Flent), and it seems to indicate I have a rather large problem with this.
So I'm going to try putting my router into modem mode and connecting it something running OpenWRT to set up SQM.
Has anyone else played about with SQM for the purposes of reducing latency? I should have some results of my experiments in a week or two, but it would interesting to know if anyone else has tried it.
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However, for the benefit of anyone who might be interested, I tried it and ... the effect is amazingly positive!
My ping times shown by Jamulus have basically halved, and I can now see what must but a full list of servers (although I have to wait about 30mins for them all to be listed).
The charts created by Flent are a bit hard to interpret, but what you can see fairly clearly in the ping time chart is that the latency during the test before was over 150ms. After, it's about 25ms.
Before:
After
BTW I ended up using a Unifi EdgeRouter-X and the stock EdgeOS it runs to turn on the SQM, with my Virgin router (a SuperHub 2ac) in "modem mode" :
I'm running dd-wrt on a Linksys WRT1900ACS for about the last 3 years. On the QoS WAN queue I've selected FQ-CODEL with the uplink set to about 92% of the maximum throughput. When I last tested about 9 months ago I did see a fairly signiifcant improvement with regards buffer bloat and a much more consistent latency.
PS: I don't have an option on dd-wrt to select SQM but the dd-wrt version I'm using is about 9 months old.
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I have questions as i am not sure that i understand correctly. If i have a look on the OpenWRT website lots of routers are supported but none with DECT telephone support, as far as in understand cause of licensing issues.
My router, a FritzBox 7560, does not support SQM and has a DECT station which we do use. Would it be possible to use a LAN router with Open WRT and activated SQM as an access point behind the DECT router ? does that work or is it nonsens ? My idea is that the LAN chain will then look like: Jamulus -> SQM capable access point -> DECT router -> Web
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Wow I didn't even know there was such a thing as a DECT router. That's a protocol for cordless phones, no? Can you explain as Google's not helping me much.
BTW for SQM to work properly you need to have a good estimate of your max up/down bandwidth and set the limits to about 80-90% of that.
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Oh I see. So it's just a router with a DECT phone base station in it. Makes sense. Odd they don't seem to have these where I live but never mind.
As to your question, I think this should work if the "access point" applies the SQM, but it's hard to say exactly. Is your DECT router actually doing TCP/IP routing or is it acting as modem for the device that's doing SQM? That's the arrangement I have and it works at least.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
For months I've been toying with the idea of changing my ISP (I'm using Virgin Fibre in London, UK) becuase I get ping times spiking up and down and other oddness like not being able to see a full list of servers and stuff, although down/upload speeds are fine.
Recently, though I've been wondering about whether my router is at least partially to blame. The other day I bumped into this site, which seems interesting:
https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/
So I ran some of the tests it reccomends to uncover "buffer bloat" (I used Flent), and it seems to indicate I have a rather large problem with this.
So I'm going to try putting my router into modem mode and connecting it something running OpenWRT to set up SQM.
Has anyone else played about with SQM for the purposes of reducing latency? I should have some results of my experiments in a week or two, but it would interesting to know if anyone else has tried it.
I take it nobody has tried this :-)
However, for the benefit of anyone who might be interested, I tried it and ... the effect is amazingly positive!
My ping times shown by Jamulus have basically halved, and I can now see what must but a full list of servers (although I have to wait about 30mins for them all to be listed).
The charts created by Flent are a bit hard to interpret, but what you can see fairly clearly in the ping time chart is that the latency during the test before was over 150ms. After, it's about 25ms.
Before:
After
BTW I ended up using a Unifi EdgeRouter-X and the stock EdgeOS it runs to turn on the SQM, with my Virgin router (a SuperHub 2ac) in "modem mode" :
https://www.ui.com/edgemax/edgerouter-x/
Last edit: Gilgongo 2020-08-15
Very interesting, thanks for the tip of the Edgerouter, maybe I will give it a try.
I'm running dd-wrt on a Linksys WRT1900ACS for about the last 3 years. On the QoS WAN queue I've selected FQ-CODEL with the uplink set to about 92% of the maximum throughput. When I last tested about 9 months ago I did see a fairly signiifcant improvement with regards buffer bloat and a much more consistent latency.
PS: I don't have an option on dd-wrt to select SQM but the dd-wrt version I'm using is about 9 months old.
I have questions as i am not sure that i understand correctly. If i have a look on the OpenWRT website lots of routers are supported but none with DECT telephone support, as far as in understand cause of licensing issues.
My router, a FritzBox 7560, does not support SQM and has a DECT station which we do use. Would it be possible to use a LAN router with Open WRT and activated SQM as an access point behind the DECT router ? does that work or is it nonsens ? My idea is that the LAN chain will then look like: Jamulus -> SQM capable access point -> DECT router -> Web
Wow I didn't even know there was such a thing as a DECT router. That's a protocol for cordless phones, no? Can you explain as Google's not helping me much.
BTW for SQM to work properly you need to have a good estimate of your max up/down bandwidth and set the limits to about 80-90% of that.
Yes, fo cordless phones. Did not notice that this is so exotic, here in Germany it is very common. Here a link to the product page
Do you think that it can work as i did describe or does the "main" router must be SQM capable ?
Last edit: rolfb 2021-01-28
Oh I see. So it's just a router with a DECT phone base station in it. Makes sense. Odd they don't seem to have these where I live but never mind.
As to your question, I think this should work if the "access point" applies the SQM, but it's hard to say exactly. Is your DECT router actually doing TCP/IP routing or is it acting as modem for the device that's doing SQM? That's the arrangement I have and it works at least.