My internet is around 1000 download 100 up speed but I sometimes get lag when playing online (I have 4 xbox's shared with my brother). All 4 xbox's have a static ip address assigned to them (infinite lease time). 2 are wired and 2 are on wifi but I rarely play all 4 at the same time anyway and usually use the 2 wired devices only.
This is a speed test with no sqm changes made (so default everything - network acceleration is turned on - hardware acceleration in the admin panel settings):
I messed about with the SQM settings and found that in order to get an A+ bufferbloat grade and actually experience no lag when playing Xbox, I have to cap my upload and download speeds significantly as you can see below:
Capped to 40mb down and 7 mb up. Anything more than this does not show an A+ grade and I do get the occasional unstable connection message when playing games like fc26.
Here are my settings for this below. I would really appreciate some assistance as I feel i'm doing something wrong as surely I should not have to cap my bandwidth that much? It also causes an issue for everyone else in my house as this bandwidth cap is to the wan, so all my devices so even when my Dad is watching a youtube vid/s (with these settings applied) whilst me and my brother are playing can cause the video to lag/long time to buffer (gaming is fine). All I really need is for the bandwidth to be capped for the 4 xbox's only (not all the devices in my house like mobile phones, firestick, etc)
Network acceleration is turned off when I enable the SQM instance btw.
Packet steering is off (I tried turning it on but don’t think it helped)
Any ideas as I really think my settings are wrong.
Are your modem connected in bridge (passtrough) mode? modem in router mode could increase latency. Enable packet steering with all cores, because if you disable HW Offloading and enable SQM, your CPU should manage all packets and is better if you distirbute work across all cores.
You can have bufferbloat in many points in your connection: Wifi (not an issue because you are wired), your router, ISP modem, even ISP infrastructure (traffic shaping, load balancing, etc), so even usually your router could be the buffer, is not the only reason of latency.
High latency is an undesirable thing, but you have to balance: If you reduce throughput, you should obtain low latency because data flow is also reduced, but if you pass the point that your throughput is so slow that is unusable, i would prefer to have some latency and better throughput.
Take into account that hardware offloading should improve your throughput (specially with 1Gb download link) and some of the latency because packets use a different high speed route that allows to bypass cpu processing. SQM prioritizes packets at the cost that CPU has to process all packets, so you take a throughput hit, and if your processor receives more packets that it can process, can be so busy that actually increases latency (thats why you should consider packet steering to all cores).
I won’t help fix the issue unfortunately, but I would just want to share that I was also trying to fix bufferbloat on my Flint 2 yesterday and I wasn’t able to do it.
I have my ISP modem in modem mode, not in router mode. I have similar settings as you (I didn’t change the advanced settings in the queue discipline tab though) and the lowest I could go is like +15ms with download active. I was only able to get +0ms on upload.
I’m on 600/30 connection. The download latency stabilizes once I get throughput lower than 500/450Mb, it gets to around +15ms and stays that way no matter how low I will go. My understanding is that sometimes ISP itself is the problem and they have bufferbloat on their system, so no matter what you will do with your router it will be always there.
I think there are a few important points worth clarifying:
SQM is designed to mitigate bufferbloat issues.
Bufferbloat generally only occurs when the broadband link is fully saturated, as that’s when buffers actually get filled.
(So if your connection is rarely saturated, you may not need to enable SQM at all.)
SQM must apply to all devices; otherwise, it cannot effectively manage queue sizes to mitigate bufferbloat.
(This means you can’t limit only some devices while leaving others unrestricted.)
Given that your main goal is gaming optimization—and your download bandwidth is much higher than your upload bandwidth, which makes downstream saturation less likely—we recommend the following:
Leave the SQM download rate set to 0 (i.e., no limit).
Focus on tuning the SQM upload rate, and run a bufferbloat test while paying attention only to the Upload Active result.
(In-game latency + Upload Active latency below ~60–100 ms is usually good enough for most games, except very latency-sensitive FPS titles.)
Also keep in mind that in-game latency fluctuations are influenced by many factors, such as the path from your ISP to the game server and the server’s own load. This means that even after tuning SQM, some latency variation can still occur.
Thanks for the replies all. My download is roughly 1gb and upload is 100mb any ideas what figure to put in the boxes at all please to get an A+ rating?
My current settings now:
packet steering is: on
hardware acceleration: disabled
