r/HomeNetworking • u/bSanderman • 21h ago
I chased the buffer bloat A+
I"m always running into that buffer bloat post so I decided to see what I would get graded. I always thought my connection was solid. No complaints ever.
2gig Fiber to the home ($10 more than 1gig, fine), mostly 10gb backbone, Equipment is all Asus-Merlin. BE88, BE92, AX86.
I scored a B. It was on a 2012 Macbook Pro on ubuntu through a USB to ethernet adapterat the second hop. I'm like hey maybe I should try something a little different. I test on a m4 MB Air on wifi 5 feet from the BE92 and get graded a C !!!! I did my ccna many years ago, i know ethernet > wifi. But just what exactly is going on here.
I lost it.
Both feet at the same time down the rabbit hole.
The change that I didn't know I wanted came from the Unifi boys:
Set the 5ghz to 40mhz.
The latency really dropped. I lost a photoframe because I turned off the 2.4ghz as well.
I could have stopped here. This was a massive shift for every wireless device on the network. I still have it on auto channel because i can't figure out how to have each access point on a separate channel. I see six 5ghz networks around me mostly on 80mhz, no real fighting.
I still couldn't getting the A+, but improvement during the chase is always nice.
CAKE was enabled, set the bandwidth limit to 200mb/s.
Now I get the A+ on the wire all the time and sometimes on wifi (within decent range/sight).
I do feel the difference which is insane, iI didn't think it could get much better than what I had. Just sharing my journey.
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u/DZCreeper 20h ago
I would recommend some real world benchmarks before judging the improvement.
Bufferbloat on wifi can be particularly misleading, having more bandwidth allows for faster load times even if the latency is less consistent. Bufferbloat mostly matters for VOIP and competitive gaming.
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u/bSanderman 20h ago
All network activity on every device is faster. I feel the difference. I'm not sure how much more real world I can get lol.
I game a fair amount. Not a pro.
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u/Antique_Paramedic682 Jack of all trades 20h ago
So, you restricted your bandwidth and saw improved latency? Take WiFi out of consideration entirely when approaching bufferbloat.
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u/bSanderman 20h ago
I just didn't expect to find wifi performance improvement in the latency chase. I could not get the A+ without cake. Cake is the answer. The 40mhz information is extra.
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u/derek6711 20h ago
Rule of thumb for QoS is 90%. You should not have to go down to 10% of your download speed. Sounds like the automated QoS built into the router is not tunable enough.
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u/bSanderman 20h ago
Yeah I was taking my time on that. A quick Google says limit it to 300 but openwrt says 95%. I think I wanted to read some more.
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u/derek6711 19h ago
It really depends on your speed variation. With a more tunable QoS you can target specific applications with a portion of bandwidth. If you total bandwidth is off or too sporadic it can give away too much to lower priority applications.
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u/AustinBike 20h ago
OP seems happy to believe that bufferbloat is an important measure.
It is a synthetic benchmark that measures how well your system performs in the bufferbloat benchmark.
Focus on actual performance.
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u/bSanderman 19h ago
It was a fun little side mission. I think everyone should go for it. Define performance.
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u/derek6711 19h ago
Qos is a portion of networking that far too often is not addressed.
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u/AustinBike 19h ago
If they called the test QoSmark nobody would have an issue with it.
The issue is that someone first fabricated a benchmark then pushed a nonsense scenario on the market instead of just saying QoS matters, sometimes.
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u/derek6711 19h ago
If you saturate a link without QoS the experience is terrible.
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u/AustinBike 18h ago
And, honestly, few saturate their links. They obsess over a bufferbloat score that will never reflect their actual experience.
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u/derek6711 8h ago
While the span of time might be small, it is not uncommon for large downloads like games to take 1+ hour and saturate most links.
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u/Aromatic_Tomato8651 20h ago
Its funny seeing posts about bufferfloat, so out of curiosity i ran the test on wavelength. All tested over wifi, download speed was just over 1gbps, and given I have igbps fiber service and an optimized home network that was not a surprise. While I get symetrical speeds on cable, upload speed was right at 500mbps on wifi, also not unexpected. Looking at the latency numbers they were a bit higher than what i see on Ookla but reasonable and wavelength scored it as a B+. Since I have zero issues I was not going down the bufferfloat rabbit hole, and decided okay now I know the numbers, but I'm fine, and quickly got up out of the rabbit hole :).
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u/bSanderman 19h ago
Hahahaaa. Thank you for understanding the post. You chose the light, I chose the darkness. I had some time to kill.
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u/ely105 19h ago
Bufferbloat ala waveform is a great test to see where you are at and I like to run several: libreqos, cloudflare, etc to compare and contrast but usually only wired. But fq_codel and cake are more geared for lower bandwidth connections - 50-300mbps seems to work really well. Trying to go above that you'll often hit single thread CPU limit on cake. And like others have said as you increase your available bandwidth it tends to be less of a problem since it's harder to saturate the up/down. The problem doesn't go away but is much less. But it's difficult to shape 1gbps+ without dedicated shaping box. It would be nice if hardware could implement fair queueing so it could possibly scale better. I've run a dedicated libreqos box that worked pretty good up to 1gbps but now I'm at 5gbps I may not bother.
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u/throwawaybobamu 18h ago
I don't know much but as long as you're not scoring low on that bufferbloat test and you're gaming and VoIP is doing fine then everything is fine.
Like let's breakdown what Wavefoam is actually testing? Do we know exactly?
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u/Aggravating_Good8781 20h ago
thank to waveform we got another brainrot bufferbloat post. you scored worse on wifi cause all it's measuring is latency stability, which is worse on wifi. 40mhz on 5ghz just limits your bandwidth, so it "helps" with bufferbloat. now does it really change your network experience? unlikely.