Comment by bdelay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bdelay | Hacker News Reader

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Parents live in a smaller town with two awful ISP selections. They had a bunch of WiFi devices on an ISP router and the connection quality and latency was just terrible when more than one device was in use and any bandwidth intensive services were being used. (Low quality Netflix is intensive on small-town monopoly internet.)

I purchased them a Netgear R7800 and installed hnyman's LEDE build [1] to enable SQM. Night and day difference in latency response. No more staring at a white screen for 3 seconds per URL click.

The build has been stable for several months. I wouldn't recommend this for non-technical users or anyone not willing to spend time troubleshooting, but it has been a great improvement. I couldn't find any other device capable of doing this without running x86 hardware or something else silly.

A few other people mention it, but yes, this is only going to work on slower connections on current SOHO hardware. I think the R7800 can do software SQM at up to 150mbps or so. Plus, if you have a gigabit symmetric connection, hopefully you aren't having bufferbloat issues.

Just wish a popular manufacturer would release an easy-to-use router with SQM so I could install it for non-technical users and forget. Ubiquiti is somewhat close to that, but I believe their prosumer hardware (USG) is running a slow processor at the moment and doesn't even support SQM without installing custom kernels.

[1] https://forum.lede-project.org/t/build-for-netgear-r7800/316

>I couldn't find any other device capable of doing this without running x86 hardware or something else silly.

Was the internet speed so high that you couldn't use a normal supported router like a TP-Link Archer C7 at half the cost? I need to do more testing but it seems my C7 can handle my 100/100Mbps fiber connection doing SQM without too much issue.

I haven't seen a router under $400 that can do fair queueing in hardware faster than ~200 megabits. If you have fiber it's cheaper to setup a beefy Linux box and run PFSense on it. Hardware offload is usually disabled when you turn on QoS so doing slow will often slow down gigabit LAN links as well

I'm at 100/100 though, so wouldn't something simpler be enough? The wired side of the router is gigabit but that's just an integrated gigabit switch, it doesn't even touch any CPU. I'll be doing more testing to make sure but my ISP doesn't seem to have too bad a buffer bloat anyway.

Sometimes turning on QoS disables offload on all ports including lan. Try a download test between local machines

My understanding of these routers is that the gigabit switch is independent from the router. They're physically on the same board but the router is just another machine on the switch. If the switch table says portA->portB it doesn't matter what the router on portC has decided to offload or not.

Edit: Maybe you mean Wifi to wired may have a disabled offload? That path does go through the router and not directly through the switch. For bigger installations I end up having one of these with wifi disabled as the router (firewall, dhcp, etc) and individual ones connected through ethernet as dumb access points (same SSID on all and straight bridge from Wifi to Ethernet). That should also avoid any issues and is a good setup to get more wifi coverage with a simple config.

Good to know, would explain why there's a phantom eth port on some of these routers, must be used to connect between router and switch chips. Sounds like you're right about wifi->wired transit though if this is the casr

The typical architecture for routers these days is that the main SoC has two ethernet interfaces, each of which is connected to a 7+ port managed switch. One of the host CPU's interfaces is on the WAN VLAN, and the other is on the LAN VLAN. Some older routers used to have just one ethernet link between the switch and the CPU, with the CPU's other interface exposed directly as the WAN port. That made it easier to avoid bloat or bugs in the ethernet switch itself, but was fundamentally incompatible with the NAT offload those switches provide, so that configuration is now almost impossible to find.

This also makes these little routers extremely powerful. Since those switches have VLANs as well you can create very interesting topologies that would require much more expensive managed switches to achieve. I run an extra VLAN from my router, to one of my APs, to a dedicated wifi SSID to another wireless router to ethernet to a TV box so I can have the TV signal in a place I can't run ethernet to. Doing it through the normal Wifi would be a bad idea because the provider uses multicast IPTV and if you put that on your wifi every connected devices receives it. And this is all done with 3 50€ routers running LEDE, each with different VLANs and wifi SSIDs configured. They make for a really flexible setup.

PFSense is great if your okay with pulling out a monitor and keyboard every time there is a config issue or interface change. Do not bring in any interfaces over USB if you like to preserve your sanity and want to use PFSense.

These days I just run OpenWRT on x86, no more will my router sit in a broken state that I can't fix by logging in over the LAN or WAN (via OpenVPN ofc). Wish PFSense would get sane defaults in this regard!

This seems like a potential sweet spot for the Espressobin [1] with pfsense but the pfsense folks have not released their ARM version, only demonstrated it [2], perhaps they're just too dang busy or perhaps it would cut into the margins of their x86 solutions. Regardless it would make a nice appliance if they ever do release a PFsense ARM image.

[1]http://espressobin.net/

[2] https://gist.github.com/gonzopancho/760ab9ecee9dfbc1b6033e48...

Just read the r7800 had the best range for an all-in-one unit. Not sure if it's true, but it has been an amazing router. I picked one up for myself -- they are 130$ refurbished on Amazon every now and then.

To answer your question: I have no idea. Would be neat if a much cheaper model had the horsepower though.

Sounds like a good recommendation. The C7 has been my go-to for cheap, good wifi, and solid LEDE support. But I haven't stress tested it to check how it will take a very congested network. My uses have had fairly light users.

The Archer C7 seems to do about 400Mbps with no configuration/optimization when running OpenWRT, plus with them being available for $20 to $30 on Craigslist and their knockoffs (Offerup & Letgo), its easy to nab one for cheap.

I hear hardware offload is possible, but I have yet to try a build that has the patches for it.

With Gigabit fiber internet I can see needing something more. I find 100Mb internet to be enough for my needs and the Wifi performance to be adequate to the NAS on the LAN. So I even prefer that there's no offload to hardware and that it's the well tested Linux kernel code doing the heavy lifting.

Ran the tests and apparently the C7 is perfectly capable of doing 100Mb/s with cake. But as it turns out I don't really need it. I already get an A for bufferbloat with my provider without it and turning it on doesn't get me to A+.

I've found that I only need to shape upload and I get almost all the bufferbloat benefits, while reducing CPU requirements because download is not shaped. Thus, a $15 router with a slow CPU can be fine for fixing bufferbloat.

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