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scenario-gargoyleforgamers

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Scenario

A gamer, living with family who don't understand that every youtube video, every facebook refresh, every google search uses bandwidth and can cause you frustrating lag spikes.

Objective

Play games that rely on low ping times without worrying about mum/dad/the family pet causing you to lag and miss those delicious headshots/skill casts etc.

Assign Static IPs

Assign a fixed static IP address to each device (mobile, laptop, tablet etc) and keep the static IPs for each person together in a group.

Gargoyle - Connection - DHCP
DHCP
LAN DHCP Server Enabled
DHCP range
Start 192.168.1.100
End: 192.168.1.249
Static IP's
Printer 192.168.1.2
Dad-laptop 192.168.1.50
Dad-mobile 192.168.1.51
Mum-tablet 192.168.1.60
Mum-mobile 192.168.1.61
Sister-laptop 192.168.1.70
Sister-mobile 192.168.1.71
Sister-tablet 192.168.1.72
Gamer-PC 192.168.1.80
Gamer-mobile 192.168.1.81

Guarantee performance for the gamer

Limit the performance impact of the rest of the family on the gamer, without choking the families connection (we want to give ourselves an advantage, but not cause dinner table arguments!)

Before giving examples of real-world settings, lets talk about how to calculate those settings. A simple example we can begin with is Teamspeak 3, a Voice Chat client used by many gamers, and crucial to the success of the team. Connect to the server you will be speaking on the majority of the time, and look at the connection address. What is the port that is being used by the server? Write this down. In this example the port is 9987. Connect to the channel you will be speaking in the majority of the time. Check the properties of the channel, you want to find the information on “Codec Quality”, the “Estimated Bitrate”. If you will be speaking in multiple channels, use the number for the highest quality (highest number). In this case this is 9.23KiB/s. The upload calculation is easy. When you speak, you transmit your own voice to the server, which then retransmits it to all the clients. So your upload is just 9.23KB/s x 8 = 73.84Kbps. Keep this for later. The download calculation is a bit less simple. You need to know how many people you will be listening to at once. Lets say you are playing a team game, and there will be 4 others on your team. IF everyone speaks at once, then the maximum you will be listening to is 4 x 9.23KB/s x 8. During intense fights, it is not unlikely that everyone may be yelling at once, so it is usually best to estimate this at the maximum number. If you were in a channel where there were spectators, you might have your 4 team mates speaking at once and 2 spectators at the same time. Use your best judgement here. In this example we will assume only our team mates will be speaking so 9.23KB/s x 4 x 8 = 295.36Kbps.

Gargoyle - Firewall - QoS (Upload)

QoS (Upload) – Classification Rules
☑ Enable Quality of Service (Upload Direction)
Source IP:
Destination Port(s):
Transport Protocol:
Set Service Class To:
192.168.1.80
9987
UDP
TS3
QoS (Upload) – Service Classes
Service Class Name:
Percent Bandwidth at Capacity:
Bandwidth minimum:
Bandwidth maximum:
TS3
73.84/Total Upload Bandwidth
73.84
No

Gargoyle - Firewall - QoS (Download)

QoS (Download) – Classification Rules
☑ Enable Quality of Service (Download Direction)
Source Port(s):
Destination IP:
Transport Protocol:
Set Service Class To:
9987
192.168.1.80
UDP
TS3
QoS (Download) – Service Classes
Service Class Name:
Percent Bandwidth at Capacity:
Bandwidth minimum:
Bandwidth maximum:
Minimize Round Trip Times (RTT):
TS3
295.36/Total Download Bandwidth
295.36
No
Minimize RTT (ping times) when active

QoS (Download) – Active Congestion Control ☑ Enable active congestion control (Download Direction)

Apply these settings, and check that your data is being classed as TS3 in the Status - QOS Distribution pie graphs.

Now we are going to setup our rules and classes for Games. This example will focus on DOTA 2.

Do some research on what your game requires to upload and download. You can estimate this by playing a full game, dividing your total download by the length of the game. If you have plenty of bandwidth, you can be a bit liberal with your estimations (rather go over than under). If the bandwidth is a bit tight, then try to estimate accurately, but give yourself a small amount of headroom. For DOTA 2, i have over estimated the download at 1024kbps (it approaches this number if everyone is using in game voice chat, but its rarely this large). I have over estiamted the upload at 240kbps. Once you have setup all the rules, you can monitor the “Load” values and see if you can lower the numbers. We also need to know what Ports our game uses. Dota uses 27005 (like a lot of steam games).

Using these assumptions, lets create some service classes and rules.

Gargoyle - Firewall - QoS (Upload)

☑ Enable Quality of Service (Upload Direction)

QoS (Upload) – Service Classes Service Class Name: Games Percent Bandwidth at Capacity: = 240/Total Upload Bandwidth Bandwidth minimum: 240 Bandwidth maximum: No

QoS (Upload) – Classification Rules Source IP: 192.168.1.80 Source Port(s): 27005 Transport Protocol: UDP Set Service Class To: Games

Gargoyle - Firewall - QoS (Download) ☑ Enable Quality of Service (Download Direction)

QoS (Download) – Service Classes Service Class Name: Games Percent Bandwidth at Capacity: = 1024/Total Download Bandwidth Bandwidth minimum: 1024 Bandwidth maximum: No Minimize Round Trip Times (RTT): Minimize RTT (ping times) when active

QoS (Download) – Classification Rules Destination Port(s): 27005 Destination IP: 192.168.1.80 Transport Protocol: UDP Set Service Class To: Games

QoS (Download) – Active Congestion Control ☑ Enable active congestion control (Download Direction)

Launch up a game of dota and see if your traffic is put into the “Games” class. If it is, then you are up to testing it under real world scenarios. Open a few youtube videos to saturate your connection and see if your ping stays REASONABLE. When the system is working well, you will get a small spike, but then it will activate and act to bring your ping down to a reasonable level.

scenario-gargoyleforgamers.1430104888.txt.gz · Last modified: 2015/04/27 03:21 by nworbnhoj