Trying to optimize my network for MyBookLive. Have many advanced options for QOS Quality of Service options on my router.
Has anyone found ideal settings for MYBookLive?
Thank you
Well, what do you mean by “Optimize?” What do you want to do?
Thanks for your response.
I’d like to improve throughput across my network as the MyBookLive is serving all my Video, Music and Photos.
I have the following option to choose from:
General Settings: | |
Enable QOS Services |
X |
WAN Upstream Rate |
100 |
Turbo TCP Enabled |
X |
Fragmentation Settings: | |
IP Fragmentation Enabled |
X |
IP Fragmentation Size |
244 |
Bandwidth Restrictions: | ||
Class of Service |
Peak Info Rate |
Committed Info Rate |
Network Control (NC) |
100 |
None |
Expedited Forwarding (EF) |
100 |
None |
Assured Forwarding (AF4) |
100 |
0 |
Assured Forwarding (AF3) |
100 |
0 |
Assured Forwarding (AF2) |
100 |
0 |
Assured Forwarding (AF1) |
100 |
0 |
Best Effort (BE) |
Unlimited |
None |
QOS Filter Rules: | |
Enable QOS Filter Rules | |
Edit QOS Filter Rules |
Not only do I have doubts about their proper settings, I’m sure my setting are degrading things.
I greatly appreciate any expertise on what I understand is a very advanced matter.
I serve to a SONY Playstation 3 / Denon 4308IC / Dell M6500 / SONY DN2010
Largest lag in the system are med to large photo files in the (950KB) range. I work in TV and when I review stills from HD frames there is a lot of lag from MYBookLive at times.
Funny thing is that there is no video lag at all as it could be the buffer can handle the frames that much smaller than 950KB.
I know this is a complicated issue and I thank you for your time.
Thank you, Tony
First things first.
In *MOST* routers, QoS is only enforced between the LAN and WAN, not between specific ports on the LAN.
Since you’re communicating across the LAN, it’s likely QoS won’t have ANY effect.
Secondly, QoS is typically only used to do a few broad tasks:
1- Prioritize traffic
2- Restrict (or “police”) traffic.
#1 only really applies if there is congestion or contention for a resource. In other words, setting up QoS to prioritize the MBL’s traffic would only be beneficial if there’s substantial OTHER traffic competing for the same resource. So, if it’s just you at a PC reading files on the MBL, and otherwise your network is fairly quiet, Prioritization isn’t going to do much at all.
#2 is what you’d do if you want to “Rate Limit” traffic, or forever keep it from exceeding a set amount of traffic over time.
Now, to your chart there:
The WAN Upstream Rate is telling the router how much bandwidth it has to work with (though the number without a unit is not helpful. ;) ) Whatever that is, it needs to match your actual WAN UPSTREAM bandwidth.
Turbo TCP may refer to:
— an optimization to the TCP protocol that helps it recover more quickly in the event that a packet gets lost. Typical TCP has an algorithm called “Slow Start,” which was a great idea when TCP was first developed, but now that internet bandwidths are well into the megabits, that Slow Start algorithm can actually slow traffic down. Turbo helps mitigate that slow-down.
— munging specific protocols (like HTTP or FTP or whatever) so they get serviced faster.
An IP Fragmentation Size of 244 seems bizarrely small. How did you arrive at that number?
Long Description:
A standard Ethernet Frame cannot exceed 1500 bytes in length of payload. It takes a “Long Time” (relatively) to send a packet that large. It’s called “Serialization Delay.” If the router starts sending that long packet, and then a higher priority packet arrives, that higher priority packet has to wait in the transmit queue a “Long Time” because that 1500 byte packet is still on the way. If packets are allowed to be fragmented, or divided, into 244 byte chunks, only 244 bytes are sent, then the High Priority packet gets sent, and then the rest of the fragments of the original frame.
Thus, the high priority packet gets sent sooner at the expense of making the lower priority packets wait. There’s also a cost involved in bandwidth… Every “fragment” contains a significant amount of “overhead.” If you divide that 1500 byte packet into 7 IP fragments, you’ve multiplied that overhead by 7, and that bandwidth gets consumed.
Each of the CLASSES of SERVICE are defined next. They’re listed there in decreasing order, with NC being the highest priority and BE the lowest.
The PEAK INFO RATE is the maximum amount of data per second each of those would be allowed. I’m guessing that’s in terms of percentage of the WAN UPSTREAM RATE. That would be the “Policing,” or traffic restriction, discussed above.
The COMITTED RATE is the GUARANTEED bandwidth allowed for each of those classes. If those are PERCENTAGES, then the SUM of the percentages cannot exceed 100.
It’s not clear to me on your particular device how those two would relate.
On some platforms, any class can EXCEED the PEAK RATE if there is no other traffic competing for service. If there IS congestion, then the rate will be diminished to no more than the COMIMTTED Rate.
But that’s only part of the story. Most traffic is not “Marked” with a class. Those CLASSES (EF, AF4, AF3, etc) appear to be referring to what’s called “DIFFSERV,” or more properly DSCP, which stands for Differentiated Services Code Point, which is part of the header of every IP packet.
If packets aren’t “marked” with the DSCP bits, they’re all going to be treated as “Best Effort.”
That “Marking” is probably done in the QOS FILTER RULES section.
But here’s the biggest caveat: Unless the router is doing this Policing and Marking in HARDWARE, one can actually incur a “penalty” because the processor is becomming busy just examining and marking every packet which can delay the packets’ transit through the router.
High-End routers do ALL of that in hardware and incur *NO* penalty whatsoever.
So, if your router IS doing all of that in software, it could be imposing such a penalty which might be responsible for the slow-down you think you’re observing.
Tony,
I wanted to thank you for your note before I apply everything you noted at will take some time and I don’t want you to think me rude by not showing my many thanks for your well thought out help to me.
I’ll follow everything you stated and see what happens and report back.
All the best to you and thank you again for your generous time and consideration.
Regards,
Tony
Well after many days. Lighting candles, cutiing off chicken heads and trying everything else I’m sure I’m a fool when it come to this stuff.
I’m going out and buying the D-Lint Gigabit DSL Modem Router with automatic QOS.
U-N-C-L-E :O)
Before you go throw money at it, are you sure QoS is even going to help you?
If there’s no congestion or contention in your network QoS won’t do anything.
I second this answer.
I know from experience that QoS can only make a difference if your network is under huge load. I have been there before.
So, my advice is don’t waste your money. However, if you still do it, please, tell us if it worked.
