QoS advice needed

[Darkman]

WRT54GL

I've currently got one of these from OcUK. It's been absolutely bullet-proof, I've never even needed to reboot it. I've set up 2 more for friends/family which have been similarly reliable. The only problem I have is lag when gaming and the other half opens up the MacBook and starts her facebook/ebay session .

I've tried QoS on the router priotising my MAC address to no effect and then the ports the game uses (which has reduced the severity of the lag). I've manually changed the upload limit as well. QoS on this router seems to be set up to work with a computer connected by LAN cable, though if it's prioritising ports does it matter if she's connected wirelessly? The lag spike is only for a few seconds when she first logs on (or longer if she's uploading photos) but it's enough.

I've dropped down from 20Mb to 10Mb cable as I'm far more interested in latency than download bandwidth but consistently get 0.48Mb/s upload and 10Mb/s download with good pings and no packet loss so my internet connection is reliable, it's just the issue with lag spikes which I need to fix.

I'd appreciate your thoughts on a solution. I've considered using different firmware but only if the QoS implementation is better than stock firmware.

I would consider a different router, ideally with the facility to plug in an external HDD for NAS (if it can handle a decent speed USB 2.0 or eSata) and a printer. Can you think of one?

Thank you for reading,

P

 

[Azuse05]

This + this (read it ). It's a starting point, you really need port based rules with correctly set bandwidth limits (particularly on the classes). The catch is you sacrifice ~8-10% of your bandwidth to create a bottleneck, but have complete control over what goes out, and the order.

If you really want a nas for performance you need ethernet, none of the usb routers have great throughput, fine for printing though. Tomato's qos can't be beet though, so you're limited to g-10/100 routers for qos but the ASUS WL-500g Premium can be had for under £50 and flashed with the usb version of tomato.

It's actually the only thing i'd replace my gl with should it die, why?. It's essentially a wrt54gl, but it's got 2 usb ports, double the ram (32meg) and a 33% faster cpu (266mhz). Try tomato first, it's qos is very effective, if easy to misinterpretate.

 

[Darkman]

Whew, that was quite a read!

I've flashed to Tomato and tweaked along similar lines to Toastman's post. I'll continue to adjust the settings and see how much of an improvement it is.

Thank you,

P