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

[Dendari Marini]

Hello,


> Um, I wasn't sure if I should mention it, because it doesn't seem like it
> should be able to cause these kinds of issues. But, if you're using steam *on
> linux*, there's a known bug where it makes hundreds (thousands?) of DNS
> queries per second, during downloads, which can cause issues if the DNS
> server on your router starts throttling. I don't know how or if that should
> affect the apparent performance of cake in different tests. But the
> workaround is to have a local DNS

cache like dnsmasq on your host (and of course it's not an issue on Windows
> machines).




All of my testing were done on Windows machines. My main test PC1 is using
the latest Windows 10 update (Creators Update), while the other PC2 is
using the latest Windows 8.1.


> That is strange, if you are running the ping tests from the same PC
> maybe there is something strange going on with windows.


>
I tested on both of my PCs. Also I didn't just do ping tests, but used real
application like TeamSpeak or games with in-game network tools to analyze
the issue. You can find my Ubiquiti Forums post with some more info in one
of the earlier mail I sent.


> What's your RTT(ping) to the different services, like Steam and Windows
> Update? Some ISPs have local CDNs that can give incredibly low latency
> relative to the provisioned bandwidth, which can cause bad things to happen
> with TCP.
>

>
I tried Battle.net and Steam (manually starting a Windows Update is rather
difficult) and it seems Battle.net servers are closer compared to the Steam
ones (and as I said I don't have the same issues with Battle.net).


>
> On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 3:44 PM, Dendari Marini <dendari92 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> On 25 April 2017 at 21:10, Jonathan Morton <chromatix99 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>>  - Jonathan Morton
>>>
>>>
>> Well, the only improvement I've seen when limiting the bandwidth with
>> Steam has been at lower than 1Mbps, don't think I want to go that far. In
>> all honesty I wouldn't limit it to 10Mbit either, with the overhead it
>> means half of my total bandwidth, not a trade-off I'm willing to do.
>>
>> Still, the issue is real and it seems Steam is the only application I can
>> reproduce it. I've seen reports about Battle.net and Windows Updates doing
>> the same thing (because they should open multiple concurrent connections),
>> but I can't reproduce it, at least not in the way Steam does.
>>
>> Anyway I'm gonna take a "pause" from all of this, I've wasted the last
>> three weeks ago just for trying resolving it but unfortunately still
>> nothing. Thanks all for your help, if there's any news I'll report it here.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Cake at lists.bufferbloat.net
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cake
>>
>>
>
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