QoS - Tomato specific question?

[Balforth]

So I got both my Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 and Asus 500gp v2 in yesterday, and was shocked at how easy it was to flash Tomato. After reading the forums a lot over at DD-WRT, I felt like it would be difficult, touchy, and dangerous. Although that may be completely false, the Tomato installs on both were painless. I used the batch file that comes with the official Tomato build to flash the Buffalo, and I used the Asus firmware restore utility that came on the CD to flash the Asus with the ND USB modded tomato binary. They were both up and running in no time.

I disabled DHCP and the WAN port on my Buffalo, cranked the transmit power to 75mW, then hooked it up with a crossover cable to my Asus router. I disabled wireless on my Asus, setup my PPoE connection and was screaming with great signal strength everywhere in my 2200sq ft ranch and basement.

I'm going to have all kinds of fun stuff running on my network, eventually voip, but currently lots of youtube, p2p crap, gaming, and general web browsing from a total of anywhere from 1-6 computers at a time.

I'm a test neighborhood for a new fiber network and I pull almost 16,000 kb/s down, and about 780 kb/s up.

I want (need) to enable QoS on the router, but I'm not real clear on the percentages used in the Tomato Outbound limit screen. I can specify a bandwidth percentage range for each class... but there's a lower value and an upper value. One guide on the web shows a range for highest as 90%-100%, high as 10% to 92%, etc.
http://www.decimation.com/mark...0/03/tomato-qos-setup/

What the hell is the lower % for? It can't be a minimum... I mean if I have a flurry of HTTP requests going out with the highest priority, I would like those be able to use all of my available bandwidth over anything else. So what if the total amount of bandwidth that those requests require is less than the lower limit of 90% I put for that class? Sorry if I'm over complicating this, it just doesn't make sense to me.

It seems to me like you should just set the max, and the whatever the lower number on the left is should just be 1%. I can't seem to find anything that explains what this range really means very well. Can anybody throw me a bone?

 

[JackMDS]

Nice outcome. :thumbsup:

Just one thing, try to set the Wireless Signal output of the Buffalo to normal and see what it does to the signal (I.e. do you get the same coverage).

It might be that on the HP Buffalo the "cranking" does nothing beside warming up the Wireless circuits.

 

[spidey07]

That would normally mean min and max. The purpose of QoS is to also guarantee service for protocols, otherwise they are completely starved of bandwidth.

 

[imported_hopeless]

Originally posted by: Balforth
I'm a test neighborhood for a new fiber network and I pull almost 16,000 kb/s down, and about 780 kb/s up.

I want (need) to enable QoS on the router, but I'm not real clear on the percentages used in the Tomato Outbound limit screen. I can specify a bandwidth percentage range for each class... but there's a lower value and an upper value. One guide on the web shows a range for highest as 90%-100%, high as 10% to 92%, etc.

What the hell is the lower % for? It can't be a minimum... I mean if I have a flurry of HTTP requests going out with the highest priority, I would like those be able to use all of my available bandwidth over anything else. So what if the total amount of bandwidth that those requests require is less than the lower limit of 90% I put for that class? Sorry if I'm over complicating this, it just doesn't make sense to me.

It seems to me like you should just set the max, and the whatever the lower number on the left is should just be 1%. I can't seem to find anything that explains what this range really means very well. Can anybody throw me a bone?

Unless it's changed with the newer versions.

The two %'s are for a min and max based on the upstream number you tell it. The reason the min is adjustable is so if you have something important (like VoIP) you could set the min side high like 85% or 90% that way it could slow it down some but wouldn't drop it way down to the point that it was too slow to use. You wouldn't want to run everthing with the min value up that high just the things that you want to have priority over the rest.

Ex:
Min 90% Max 100% for VoIP
Min 1% Max 100% for P2P

The router should slow the P2P down enough to keep the VoIP at the 90%, but together use all of the upstream speed that you listed.

If you put everything at 1% to 100% than that's almost like running with no QoS at all.

 

[imported_hopeless]

Originally posted by: JackMDS
Nice outcome. :thumbsup:

Just one thing, try to set the Wireless Signal output of the Buffalo to normal and see what it does to the signal (I.e. do you get the same coverage).

It might be that on the HP Buffalo the "cranking" does nothing beside warming up the Wireless circuits.

He already put tomato on it so no the transmit power is a number instead of the tiers in Buffalo's stock firmware.

 

[JackMDS]

Originally posted by: hopeless

He already put tomato on it so no the transmit power is a number instead of the tiers in Buffalo's stock firmware.

Normal is 33 - 40mW.

 

[Balforth]

Got it - Here's what I was misunderstanding. I thought if I set up my highest class to use 90%-100%, and I set up a rule for VoIP to use the highest class, that if my VoIP stream wasn't using 90% to 100% of the bandwidth, the rule wouldn't fire and those packets wouldn't be prioritized. But what you guys are saying is that in the event that something else is trying to gobble up all my bandwidth, the QoS mechanism would maintain 90% of my bandwidth for VoIP and other traffic would be left to fend for the remaining 10%.

Jack: My version of tomato came with the default set at 10... I know I've read elsewhere that the default was 24 for a while, and then 42. I guess I'll try knocking it down to 40 and see what results I get. I'm also in the process of constructing the metal box you told me I should put my wireless router in. I really hope that helps.

 

[JackMDS]

Originally posted by: Balforth
Jack: My version of tomato came with the default set at 10... I know I've read elsewhere that the default was 24 for a while, and then 42. I guess I'll try knocking it down to 40 and see what results I get.

If Buffalo did not change the components of the HP Wireless, then it might be that raising up the is signal is adding Noise rather has making the transmission stronger .

The firmware usually changes the output of the regular Radio, in the HP Buffalo the regular radio feeds the High Power Amp. that needs only 10mW input.

Thus raising up the Regular Radio output does not add anything but heat and noise.

However I di not tried with thr current version of the hardware so it would be helpful to find out how it behaves.

 

[imported_hopeless]

Not sure if you read the wikibook page on tomato, but it goes over some of it and has some links for further info.

Tomato firmware wikibook

 

[Balforth]

Thanks -- I read it all, but I was still getting thrown with the "minimum" part of "minimum and maximum percentages of the connection each classification is allowed to consume". It didn't make sense that if I wanted something to always be prioritized high, that it would have to be using a minimum amount of bandwidth. I was just confused and nothing I read made it very clear.

 

[imported_hopeless]

This is how I understand it, but I'm not a network guru.

The different classes allow you to give certain items priority over others, so packets for those apps will be allowed to go first. The %'s come into play when your apps are trying to use more bandwidth than you have available.