Gargoyle Forum

HI everyone. I'm seeking feedback on my QoS settings... just because I'm somewhat new to Gargoyle and am planning to send this router off to family in Mexico. I'm testing it on my 6/1mbps connection. Their connection is a wireless ISP that varies massively by time of day and days of the week. Download speeds vary between 1 and 7mbps and upload is usually pretty consistent... over 600kbps was what I got when I was there for two weeks this winter. I just want to be sure I haven't committed any mistakes, even though the current QoS settings have been working great for me over the last three days:

Download QoS
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I intially had it at 65/25/10, but router was having trouble balancing a BitTorrent vs Ubuntu file download. So knocked it down to 70/25/5 and seems much better know. I know "slow" is by default at 1% but I just want to be sure it has some bandwidth in case they use some non 80/443 stuff... like gaming, VoIP, Skype, etc. I did change "fast" from the first 1024kb to the first 5120kb, since I noticed a lot of image heavy websites (such as tumblr) quickly run out of 1024kb. I'm guessing "normal" is more for downloads and movies?

Upload QoS
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This is probably the section I feel most uneasy about. I set it to 50/25/25 since I'm guessing regular browsing doesn't require as much upload, but at the same time, I want "slow" non80/443 stuff to have some bandwidth... in case they VoIP, game, Skype, etc.

Any changes you would recommend?

Just providing feedback based on my trial and error from above!

I didn't know Gargoyle provided equal sharing of data by IP. Had I known this, the above would have been different.

Anywho, I've been so happy with Gargoyle that I bought an identical router and installed Gargoyle on it as well. It's now my main router at home.

To start off, first I removed TCP for port 80 and 443. Apparently some new protocols use UDP to stream videos on Youtube if you enable some developer options. So in the future UDP over 80/443 may be mainstream.

I got rid of giving high priority to the first 5MB of port 80/443 (webpage) connections. I noticed many sites make multiple connections. Basically, that Fast priority became the prominent category, causing videos to lag. Now that I learned Gargoyle does IP sharing of data, I got rid of that and make it simple. All port 80/443 (web browsing) and 53 (DNS) goes into high priority. IP sharing takes care of the rest. This fixed video buffering issues while still providing plenty of speed for web browsing. This was important since I have a family member who can use up to 10GB a day in videos if she's home all day!

For upload, I also simplified it. 50% for web and 50% for other.

Explanation for the Slow/other category: this is mainly for torrents, VoIP, games, and video chats such as FaceTime/Skype. I have a slow-ish connection (5-6 down, 1 up) so I have to protect myself against torrents bringing down my connection, yet I need to provide some bandwidth for videos chats, games, and VoIP. If there are only two of us using the Internet, I don't think splitting torrents and web browsing 50/50 is fair for download.

For those of you with fast connections, you can probably just set one class and let IP sharing take care of equally sharing data. My setup now looks like this:

Download:



Upload:



PS. The port 4500 is for a L2TP IPSec VPN I occasionally use.