Buffer Bloat?

[pcswig13]

Good morning all!
I am working on a dropped packets issue with a small business network (15 clients on a private network and a publicly available "open" VLAN). The network is a cable provider (Spectrum) connection to the WWW, with a Cisco router that feeds a private VLAN and a public VLAN via Unifi managed switches (2 of them).

While doing some research I ran across a connection speed test that also shows something called "buffer bloat" within your router. The test reports over 400ms delay caused by this buffer bloat.
I run the same test on my fiber network at home and get very little "bloat" identified.
I can't find much info on buffer bloat outside the website where I found the test program, so wondering is this "buffer bloat" a real thing or something this site uses to sell product?

 

[razel]

It's a thing that occurs only when connections saturate your Internet line. 90% of the time you are not maxing out the capability of your Internet connection... well unless you are still stuck with 3mb/s DSL. If your line is saturated most of the time then the correct solution is to up your bandwidth.

Therefore the 10% or so of the time it does happen the easiest way to mitigate it is to use QOS to limit your Internet speed. Yup... most people don't seem to want to do that either. It's really not a thing that happens all the time and bufferfloat itself is a bloated issue.

 

[pcswig13]

It's a thing that occurs only when connections saturate your Internet line. 90% of the time you are not maxing out the capability of your Internet connection... well unless you are still stuck with 3mb/s DSL. If your line is saturated most of the time then the correct solution is to up your bandwidth.

Therefore the 10% or so of the time it does happen the easiest way to mitigate it is to use QOS to limit your Internet speed. Yup... most people don't seem to want to do that either. It's really not a thing that happens all the time and bufferfloat itself is a bloated issue.

Thank you Rachel.
This is a 10mbps/1mbps cable connection with a relatively small office using it. There are 8 VOIP phones and 8 computers connecting, but in a very random pattern (i.e. not all staff are in the offices at the same time). I am new to QoS setups and did attempt to tweak things some after enabling an option in the Open WRT router (their SQM option) but this has not helped with the random disconnects and wireless drops.

 

[razel]

Sounds like your line is just saturated then. There are different methods of QOS. Off the top of my head I forgot which ones are used to help mitigate bufferfloat. I remember seeing a video from Untangle off YouTube that shows you. You don't need Untangle to do it, DD-WRT has the same QOS settings. However I doubt no amount of QOS will help a saturated line. You can only improve a bit, but a saturated line is a saturated line.

I can also continue to guess that perhaps even your the local LAN may need to be analyzed to help improve routing, but like I mentioned I'm just guessing at this point. Perhaps someone else can chime in.

 

[pcswig13]

Thank you Rachel!