Those look like really impressive results. How does it 'feel', can you tell when using the connection day to day?
Honestly? Night and day. I run my own off-prem DNS as you know (I think). I used to run AdGuard Home on my NAS but a couple of outages (thanks, VM) left everyone's phones/i-devices unable to use the 'net - even those who were away from home at the time. I now run it on Oracle Cloud's free tier, on a very fast ARM/Ampere instance. No matter what happens at home, DNS over HTTPS/TLS/QUIC is always available through my domain, about 20ms away in London. There's a point to this, I promise...
Without SQM, websites were always a little slow to resolve and load. Nothing serious, and everyone just got used to it, but it was always a case of click > hang on a blank page and wait a second > start loading > loaded. For gigabit Internet you'd expect that pages were basically instant, but no. Even on the Threadripper box it was the same, whether Linux, BSD or Windows. I put it down to a mix of waiting on the DNS adblocking, running privacy extensions in the browser (uBlock Origin, LocalCDN, Javascript Restrictor, DuckDuckGo, Cookie AutoDelete etc), and the huge mess that is the modern unnecessarily javascript-laden web. It just became the norm.
Now I've enabled SQM clicking links is literally just 'click/loaded'. Snappy and instant. It feels like I hugely upgraded the DNS resolution times and put in a faster CPU, even though all that actually happened was better latency under load. DNS resolution remains the same, around 20ms. Actual page load is now basically instant. Often surprisingly so.
I also notice that on Reddit, for example, the autoplay videos used to start playing and then crash quite quickly to 240p. Same for iPlayer etc. Now they load and play at 1080p and stay there. WiFi calling on our iPhones is now glitch free and clear, whereas before it would clip audio and drop syllables every few seconds. Refreshing a text feed, loading posts, scrolling on infinite scroll type sites (Reddit, Facebook (so I'm told, I refuse to use the privacy monster) and DuckDuckGo results) all just pop up instantly. Before it was 'hit the wall at the bottom of the results, stare at the blur and count to three, continue scrolling after loading'. Now they just keep on appearing as you go, even on old/slow devices. No delays.
Loads of little quality of life improvements. My wife even noticed, and commented the Internet felt much faster - what had I done? LOL That's always a good sign! That said, we also had a conversation last week where she asked me why I bothered spending so much time messing with the network, routers, Ruckus WiFi, adblockers, and Linux stuff... After all, 'everything works fine'. Yeah... that's kinda the point - you don't notice, because it all works fine and I keep it that way. If I stopped, or something broke, you'd soon notice and complain... The typical paradox for every BOFH. When you bust a nut and keep things sweet, it's thankless. The minute something goes wrong upstream, it's your fault because you're the nerd who keeps 'messing' with it.
Edit: A word. Derp.
I've been around, just not on this thread. I've been occasionally educating people (upon invitation) on Reddit/forums/chats about how to fix their 'Internet' with OpenWrt and SQM. I think that's even more fun than actually having low latency Internet under load... But I think you're patient zero for that, too!
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