[Cake] Getting Cake to work better with Steam and similar applications

[Tristan Seligmann]

On Sat, 22 Apr 2017 at 11:36 Jonathan Morton <chromatix99 at gmail.com> wrote:

> With the correct version of iproute2 installed, just issue “man tc-cake”.
> That’s the official documentation.
>

FWIW, since I gather the OP is using Lochnair's builds on an ER-X:
unfortunately EdgeMAX does not ship the man utility, but there is an HTML
rendered version of the man page here:
https://dl.lochnair.net/Bufferbloat/Cake%20(Cobalt)/tc-cake.8.html

It’s possible, if you can figure out which traffic is Steam in the first
> place, and write filters to match on it.  This is complicated by the fact
> that Valve runs a sophisticated CDN to handle their rather impressive
> bandwidth load.
>

I haven't succeeded at this before, as Steam's content server network is
large and complicated making it difficult to identify the servers by IP
address, and the actual traffic itself is TCP over standard HTTP(S) ports.

The behaviour I've seen in the past is that the Steam client will maintain
10 connections (each to a different content server), starting with the
region configured in settings, but cycling through various servers to find
the fastest ones. (The number of connections may depend on your detected
connection speed, I haven't tried this on very fast or very slow
connections) This tends to produce pretty nice results for your download
performance, but of course per-flow fairness alone means it'll tend to
drown out single flows. cake's dualhost/triple-isolate fairness works
pretty well for me, though, at least in terms of shielding other hosts on
the network from the host doing the Steam downloading.
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