Gaming QoS - Need Advice

[nsane]

So I played a bit with QoS Settings (came from dd-wrt which never pleased me). Seems to work better than dd-wrts so far, but i still got some questions.

The main goal is to prevent lags in Dota2. This game seems to be very sensitive to slight ping increases.

I got 2 roommates which also like to play Dota2.
Our problem is, sometimes lags occur when one of us is playing and the other one surfs the web/watches videos.

We ended up playing together or dont use the internet at all when one of us is playing.

TL;DR 2Mbit Line, Need low ping for gaming, 3 PCs need their traffic shaped

Now i figured out 2 ways to distribute the bandwidth:

1. Give any of us 3 about 33% of the bandwidth and let them decide what to do with it.
2. Create a class for Dota2 and Teamspeak3 and "prioritize" them.


What would be your attempt? Has anybody dont one of those options before? Would someone come up with another solution?

Thanks in advance

[pbix]

First read the Wiki.http://www.gargoyle-router.com/wiki/doku.php?id=qos

Then figure out how much bandwidth Dota2 needs when you are playing. Then multiply by three to get the total it needs if everyone is playing.

Create two QoS classes. The first class is your gaming class, Set its minBW to the above calculated BW. Set the PercentBW of this class to 1% and the maxBW to nolimit. Check the minRTT box.

Second class is your "Normal" class. It should be MinBW=0, %BW=99, maxBW=nolimit.

The Normal class is your default class. All traffic that does not get directed to the gaming class falls into this Normal class. Gargoyle will automatically divide this class equally between you.

Make rules to correctly direct your gaming traffic and only your gaming traffic to the gaming class.

Do this on both the upload and download pages.

Set the download and upload BW correctly on the respective pages.

Enable ACC, check that its ping target is correct.

Test

When posting questions post your QoS pages and your test results.

[nsane]

Well, first: thank you very much!

I will do like you mentioned.

But I got another question before:
Teamspeak3 is nearly as important as Dota2 is, pingwise.
I know the Teamspeak servers port, but the client port gets opened randomly.
Is there a way to deal with this? Maybe create a custom L7 profile for teamspeak3?

[pbix]

If you know the teamspeak server port you can use that. But first start simple and get Dota2 working well. Then make things more complicated.

L7 Pattern does not work well as discussed in the Wiki page I asked you to read.

[nsane]

Here are my settings. I took those screens while playing Dota2:

Upload: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/855/yrpe.jpg/
Download: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/585/ojgr.jpg/

I did some testing, when i start a big http download, pings peak at about 200ms in Dota. Watching youtube videos pushes the game's ping to about 350ms. I then reduced the target ping time to 25, which made ingame pingtime a bit better, but still too high (259ms when watching youtube videos).
I also checked that youtube traffic goes through the Normal Class and Dota2 traffic is on Dota2-Class.

Do you have any further suggestions?

Regarding L7: since I couldnt find any appropriate patterns for my applications i skipped this part of the documentation Sorry for that, I might have another look at it.

[Wisse]

Hey, I'm quite pleased with my Dota 2 QoS config. You can give it a go yourself.

Here you can see my Upload rules. There are quite a few of them. Dota 2 is the first one on the list (list gets evaluated from top to bottom, so order matters very much!)
Same goes for my download rules. Dota 2 is the first one again.

I have ACC on, without non-standard target or manual control for them.

You don't need as many rules as I have. Two, shown on your screenshots are enough, as long as Dota 2 (and other games) gets it's own class with Min BW.

I only use two ports for two PCs. I found some info that Dota 2 uses port 27005 by default. I used Launch Options (Steam -> Library -> Right click on Dota 2 -> Properties -> General -> Set launch options) to force fixed port on a second PC with "+clientport 27006" command.
EDIT: You might have to use config.cfg for clientport settings according to Steam support link above. I do think that it works if it's put only in Launch Options tho, since my game always skips Valve logo and opens console, which is what I also forced with some commands.
I would set fixed ports for all of your computers, probably avoiding default (eg. 27008, 27009, 27010) in case more friends join you on your network. I would still start with 27005 when writing rule (eg. 27005-27010).
There's no need for the broad range that you use now. You have to write rules that are as unique as possible to your application in order to minimize random interference from other connections.

There's one more very important thing that I noticed. Dota 2 can use up quite a lot of bandwidth. I didn't really look into it, but I suspect that the bursts might come from in-game voice chat. This is very important because my ping used to spike insanely when Dota 2 total (both PCs) bandwidth usage exceeded its Min BW setting.
I guess your Min BW is OK, since you won't really need QoS when all three of you are playing, but will suffice when two or less are.

For TS, you can look into my Skype to Skype settings, where I just push it in higher-than-default class, with more BW available, or you can create something similar to Dota 2 rules with Min BW. You could possibly put it in the same class as Dota 2. Obviously you have to swap destination and source port compared to Dota 2 rules, since you know what server uses instead of a client.

Try it out and let us know how it goes.

[nsane]

at first thank you for your replies

Wisse: We make heavy use of cl_interp and stuff in Dota2
Normally the Dota2 client interpolates for 500ms ping afaik.
This caused some kind of input delay for us. For that reason i set Dota to interpolate for 100ms. This is great when playing with 60ms, what we normally do. It'#s a huge input delay reduction.
Unfortunately, it sucks when ping raises to above 100ms.
This could be part of the problem im my case.
Maybe I need to find a good compromise between interpolation and ping (e.g. let Dota interpolate for 200ms)?

Without QoS activated Youtube raises my ping to 700ms. With QoS on its only to about 200ms. I am not quite sure if this is all QoS can do or of it is possible to achieve even better pings without sacrificing half of my bandwidth.

Did you fiddle around with interpolation too?

The reason i choose such a broad port range is Valve. They recently increased their port ranges widely. It's also to include matchmaking. I could try to set that portrange to UDP only, would make sense though.

EDIT: I am pretty sure my settings do what they should do, but maybe they aren't aggressive ebough?

[pbix]

If you have a ping target of 12ms and experience pings of 700ms then clearly something is major league wrong. Both your ping target is unrealistic and ACC is not working.

Enter a non standard ping target of 208.67.220.220.
Uncheck the ping target time returning it to the automatic settings.
Post a screen shot which shows 700ms filter ping time as you claim. I want to see the screen while to problem is happening, not at some random time.

To set your expectation, with a 1400kbps link your realistic ping times will be around 100ms.

ACC operates on a 5-10 second kind of time frame. So there are transient periods where you might get a large ping but it should come back to the limit.

Do not complicate your setup further until we have this much working.

[Wisse]

@nsane: I did not play with interpolation till now. I've decided to do some tests tho. I'm wondering how it'll go (no time for testing right now).

After a bit of reading, I didn't come to the same conclusion as you did about interpolating for 500ms ping. I think the default is more like 50ms with 2 samples or something like that. I'll have to do some more reading.

As for QoS rules, I've written everything that I know/use. You'll have to decide if you want to do some more testing.
I don't have any noticeable spikes under any kind of WAN load. The sole exception might be heavy upload, which might rise ping for a few ms.
I think there's room for improvement in your configuration and I would agree with pbix about taking one step at a time.

[tyler]

I am confused as to why you are giving your gaming only 1% bandwidth when you want it to take priority. Could someone please explain?