Bufferbloat is high latency (or lag) that occurs when there’s other traffic on your network. This means that your network isn’t responsive under normal working conditions. It’s wasting your time. Here’s what you can do:
1. Measure the Bufferbloat: Use the Waveform Bufferbloat Test to measure the latency under load (this is a good measure of responsiveness). If the test shows a letter grade worse than a B, you probably have bufferbloat. Most likely, the device at your bottleneck link (usually your router) is letting bulk traffic (uploads/downloads) interfere with (and delay) your time-sensitive traffic (gaming, video calls, Facetime, etc.) For more details about testing, read the Tests for Bufferbloat page.
2. Possible Solutions: There are lots of ways to throw time or money at this problem. Most won’t work.
3. Take Control of Your Network: No one else (not your router manufacturer, nor most ISPs) have as strong an incentive to fix it. Once you do, the network will stay fixed for all time, and you can adapt to changing practices at your ISP or other vendors.
You need to find a router vendor that “understands” latency/responsiveness/bufferbloat, and has updated the firmware to use one of the Smart Queue Management algorithms such as cake, fq_codel, PIE, or others. Here are some options, from easy to harder:
First, measure the link speed without SQM (say, using Waveform) then turn on SQM and measure again while observing the latency measurements. Start with the no-SQM up and down speed settings keep adjusting and measuring until the latency remains low while achieving good speeds. See, for example, this description of a tuning session.
Install an off-the-shelf router with SQM Several commercial router vendors have a clue. Here is a list of those we have found:
Upgrade your current router. Install OpenWrt firmware (version 22.03, 21.02, 19.07, or 18.06). The Smart Queue Management guide tells how to configure the luci-app-sqm package. Or install suitable DD-WRT, Gargoyle or Tomato firmware, all of which support some kind of queue management based on FQ-CoDel and/or Cake.
Call your router vendor’s support line if none of the above are possible. You have the information from the latency tests. Mention that the ping times get really high when someone is up/downloading files, and that it really hurts your network performance. Ask if they’re working on the problem. Ask when they’re going to release a firmware update that solves it.
Your network’s responsiveness is in your hands…
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