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

[Andy Furniss]

Jonathan Morton wrote:
> 
>> On 25 Apr, 2017, at 21:22, Dendari Marini <dendari92 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> 
>> The good news is that using switch0 as inbound and pppoe0 as
>> outbound works, and I was able to set up Steam as bulk using the
>> interface on the ER-X (used DSCP 8 and used a custom DPI category).
>> I confirmed this was working by looking at the bulk traffic
>> increasing (using the "tc -s qdisc" command) and by starting
>> another download (Steam gets pretty much nothing in this case).
>> 
>> The bad news is this isn't enough to fix my gaming issue (still
>> having ping spikes, latency variation and packet loss), and even
>> using it with Steam configured to use just one connection didn't
>> change much from my previous testing.
>> 
>> So I'm  really confused :\ What could cause ping spikes in this
>> case (assuming the multiple connections aren't the issue)?
> 
> As noted, it’s far more difficult to control latency from downstream
> of a bottleneck link.  If a bulk sender decides to send burstily,
> those bursts will always collect in the dumb queue at the far end and
> delay other traffic.  The only true solution is to install a smart
> queue at the upstream end - but that’s not under your control.
> 
> You may see some improvement from wholesale reducing the inbound
> bandwidth, to say 10Mbit.  This is especially true given the high
> asymmetry of your connection, which might require dropped acks
> upstream to keep filled downstream - and dropped acks will tend to
> increase burstiness of sending on unpaced senders.
> 
> You should also try to ensure ECN is fully enabled on your LAN hosts,
> especially the ones running Steam.  This will help to reduce
> retransmissions and loss-recovery cycles.

Yea, good idea - hopefully steam servers will honor that.

Plus remember what I said about raw - you have an upstream fail case
with sacks - also see below.

I just looked at a tcpdump I made last night doing a steam d/l, mainly
to see if I got servers in the list from the steam link posted, I did.

The other stand out thing is there are far more sacks than I would
normally expect to see.

tcpdump -nnr steam2.pcap src host 192.168.0.224 | grep "sack" | wc -l
reading from file steam2.pcap, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet)
28298

tcpdump -nnr steam2.pcap src host 192.168.0.224 | wc -l
reading from file steam2.pcap, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet)
44094

incoming count -

tcpdump -nnr steam2.pcap dst host 192.168.0.224 | wc -l
reading from file steam2.pcap, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet)
59319

That's a crazy amount especially as being in recovery means ack per packet.

My connection is quite different from the OPs of course, ptm 66 meg sync
with cake at 60mbit for this test and the pcap was only over 12 seconds.
The servers are only 8ms away from me, 5 connections.

I wonder if they are using bbr or something.