Is a 25mbit connection faster than a 7.5mbit connection in terms of latency?

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fefrie

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I'm considering upgrading my internet from 7.5mbps to 25mbps.

I'm on a home network with 7 users and their devices and at any given moment there are anywhere from 2-4 users using their computer.

At times it can be slow when there are more users on, but even if it's just me surfing (even via ethernet) that the internet seems a bit slow.

I'm running a router with a 300mhz processor with 32mb ram and tomato running QOS and with QOS off or on and just me on the internet, it just doesn't seem 'zippy' enough.

If I were to upgrade to a 25mb connection would I have a more latency free experience? Even google searching takes a second or two.

I should also mention that I have a bitmeter running that monitors bandwidth traffic, and rarely do I ever see the connection saturate, even when watching youtube videos.

UPDATE TO QUESTIONS.

My upload is 512kb with a QOS setting of 400kb. I've read toastman's tutorial on QOS extensively, so I know about the syn fin and ack's When it comes to down/up ratio it can be as low as 20:1 or as high as 100:1 when comparing traffic for each class.

When I mean latency, I mean ping times and when it comes to fast internet, I'm hoping for a click, bam, click, bam experience. When I go to the computer store and play with their brand new computers, it's click/bam. Even the surface rt.

Some sites I expect slowness, but on sites like google and craigslist which are simple text sites, I expect a quick response.

At home, I have a laptop from 2007, but with a ssd, and my roommate has a 2013 laptop, and it's not as snappy as hoped either.

Later I will bypass the router and see how it is.
 
Solution
photonboy
As said, increasing your network BANDWIDTH won't necessarily help.

You mention not saturating your current bandwidth. Also LATENCY is generally the time between YOUR PC connecting to a REMOTE PC. There's several things involved:
a) Your network card/chip (especially if wi-fi not ethernet)
b) Your ROUTER/MODEM
c) Network traffic between house and remote location
d) Server on the other end.

*In general, latency like you may be thinking of is mostly for things like GAMING where you may need a better Router or PC card and quick reaction times in shooters is needed. For BASIC tasks like web browsing, online videos etc latency isn't involved much as I understand it. You're basically just throttled by either:
a) Your network server cap...
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PsyKhiqZero

PsyKhiqZero

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latency has nothing to do with speed. There is no guarantee that upping the connection speed will decrease the latency. At best you could try a new router. My router runs an 800mhz cpu. Have you tried running directly connected? or how about on each computer separately on it's own.
 
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Solandri

Solandri

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Jan 4, 2012
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How's the upload bandwidth and traffic look? The type of latency you're describing is commonly caused by saturating your upload bandwidth. That can cause certain sync packets used by TCP/IP to be delayed, causing download latency even though you're not saturating download bandwidth.* Usually it's a filesharing app which is saturating upload bandwidth.

If you determine that to be the cause, go back to the QoS settings and limit your total upload bandwidth on the router to about 80% of your actual upload bandwidth. This will prevent uploads from saturating the upload channel to the point where the TCP/IP sync packets get delayed.

* TCP/IP prioritizes reliability above all else. When you download something via TCP, the server sends some data, then sends a packet asking your computer "did you get that?" Your computer must send a reply packet saying "yeah I got that" before TCP will continue sending the next batch of data. If your upload channel is saturated your computer's reply can be delayed, causing TCP to "pause" the download until it receives your computer's acknowledgment.
 
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photonboy

photonboy

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Jun 20, 2006
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As said, increasing your network BANDWIDTH won't necessarily help.

You mention not saturating your current bandwidth. Also LATENCY is generally the time between YOUR PC connecting to a REMOTE PC. There's several things involved:
a) Your network card/chip (especially if wi-fi not ethernet)
b) Your ROUTER/MODEM
c) Network traffic between house and remote location
d) Server on the other end.

*In general, latency like you may be thinking of is mostly for things like GAMING where you may need a better Router or PC card and quick reaction times in shooters is needed. For BASIC tasks like web browsing, online videos etc latency isn't involved much as I understand it. You're basically just throttled by either:
a) Your network server cap (which includes other people sharing your connection), or
b) The web server on the other end deciding on your bandwidth

RECOMMENDATIONS?
That's a little tricky.
1) Try using ETHERNET instead of wi-fi if you aren't already. If that's a lot better then the problem is with your ROUTER and/or PC wi-fi card.

2) If ETHERNET doesn't help, a better ROUTER might.

3) I don't think a higher NETWORK BANDWIDTH will matter much if both are on DSL or Cable. If you were going from DSL/Cable to Fibe that might be totally different.

Summary:
So my advice really boils down to trying different hardware. Again:
- Ethernet vs wi-fi (wired vs non-wired)
- Better Router
- Better Network card/chip
 
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Solution
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fefrie

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Feb 13, 2014
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Later I will bypass the router and see how it is.
 
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fefrie

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Feb 13, 2014
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My upload is 512kb with a QOS setting of 400kb. I've read toastman's tutorial on QOS extensively, so I know about the syn fin and ack's When it comes to down/up ratio it can be as low as 20:1 or as high as 100:1 when comparing traffic for each class.
 
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bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
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First completely turn off the QoS you may have it misconfigured. You do not need QoS if you are not exceeding your capacities. The router will just be using CPU and then doing nothing with the packets anyway.

You have indicated it does this when there is very little users on the network. This means you likely have no issues with either you upload or download capacity.

500k up would only limit you if you were doing something that sends a lot of data. Video chat, some online games, bit torrent are the common ones.

Latency in the networking sense is purely the measure of time it takes to go from one location to another and this is primarily a distance thing.

The simple test is to run continuous ping commands. Pretty much the only ones that you can do any thing about are your router and the first ISP router.
So open 2 cmd windows and run pings to those IP. When you see issues see which of those numbers increase . If the first one does then the problem is entirely in your house. It is the PC itself or the router or if you are using wireless the wireless network. If you see it only in the second one then it could be a capacity issue. Now if you get packet loss that is not latency that is some form of error and is actually the most common problem people see.

If you see nothing in these first 2 hops then you can run traceroute to some site you feel is slow and run ping to some more of the hops. The problem will be say you find the issue is 5 hops into the trace. This means there is a issue inside the providers network. It is not like they are going to even talk to you about it.



 
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fefrie

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I've turned off QOS and the 'snappiness' has seemed to returned. I can only guess that QOS is working properly. Since I have burst speed with my cable dsl I can only really restrict with uploads. I check the categories that traffic falls under (when the conection is not saturated) and everything seems about right.

Occasionally I'll have to turn it on if someone abuses, but I hope that if everybody appreciates a faster connection they'll be nice.
Here are my settings. If you have anything to comment on please do so.

http://imgur.com/wzsmQGG

wzsmQGG

wzsmQGG.png

 
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bill001g

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That is a huge config likelyit takes a huge amount of cpu to process this.

You might want to try to define 3 class. Stuff that is really important maybe a few game ports, and stuff that causes you issues and then everything else. You would try to put as few simple filters as possible, doing deep packet inspection to find flash or something is going to put a huge load. You are better off putting in source ip for youtube if that is really important.

At least start small and then add you will soon find the limit the router will tolerate.


You are also much better off if you try to set the limit first running wireshark to see what the ratios really are. Although the document you refer to says 1:100 it can easily get 1:1000. When tcp transfer really gets going you can ACK 64k bytes or even more with a 64 byte packet. This is called TCP window size and is what really limits how fast it can transfer. If for example you were using a 64k window and your round trip latency was 100ms you can download 5.12mbits/sec with only 5.12kbytes of upload.
 
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fefrie

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Those are the stock classes that were part of the firmware install.

The only thing I can think of doing close to what you recommend is to delete all classes except for the ones that would be involved with torrenting, and place the unclassified packets in a higher class.

But with that in mind, wouldn't the cpu still waste effort in analyzing all those packets?

 
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bill001g

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Unfortunately you will never find torrent it can even get though a proxy server so it is almost impossible to regulate. It depends how devious the people you are trying to limit are. All they really have to do is figure out your priority ports and set it to that. Many people run torrent on port 80 when nothing else is allowed.

I would start with the small group of classes say web surfing and favor that and let the rest share what is left. This list seem to be almost random. I can not see why they would even check for things like RSVP which no ISP will allow in the Internet.

It always hurts to touch packets. That is the key reason layer3 switches can only do so much because they don't delay packets where a router can do much more but tends to add more delay. You would think though the less things it checks for the better. It really depends how they do the checking. Commercial firewalls use custom asic chips to do some of the filters rather than a general cpu. I suspect the most intensive ones are the ones marked l7 since those are not simple port scans. Then they have things like rules 35 and 36 that change the priority based how much traffic is done on web surfing. This requires keeping huge lists of session tables.

The key rule to always remember simple is better when it comes to network. Define you problem and solve that do not do more than you absolutely have to, the complexity itself will many times cause more issues than you were trying to solve in the first place.
 
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fefrie

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These 40 or so filters are what the router came with. I had no idea that they were too many classes.

There really are only three classes I need. VOIP, Normal and torrent.

The router is very good at tracking torrenting with the present filters. I can see it get pushed into lower classes.

But I think I may revise the classes and ditch the L7 filters. You say that they require a lot of CPU usage.

I think the simplest solution would be to filter via IP address. I think that would be the easiest on the router.

Everybody would fall under a standard class with almost full use.

Bad people just fall into a crawl class with limited upload speed.

It's pretty easy to see people who torrent compulsively, they are the ones with unreasonable amount of connections.

I'll test by deleting most of the rules (creating a backup of course). I think the worst rules that need to go are the ones that have an L7 Filter.

Is there anything else you can recommend removing?

WU0QAT8.png

 
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bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
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Sounds like a good plan.

Like all QoS things you try them and see how well they work and then tune it from there. This is why I always laugh at the routers that have high,medium and low queues but no real definition of what that means. As you are finding out it is extremely hard to control traffic even with a router that have a very advanced QoS.
 
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fefrie

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I migrated from DD-wrt which really didn't show how or what it was QOS'ing. With Tomato, the graphs are much much better.

I've deleted all the L7 filters and it seems to be working better.
 
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