Latency and bridged connections

[waterwiel]

We currently have an uncapped 4mbps account, and another capped account.

We are a family of 4 people all using one account at a time, and there are times when torrents are being downloaded by other people in my family when I want to play online international games.

Now the problem is, even if the torrents are run at a low speed, the latency to europe shoots to 600-1k as opposed to 260ms when there is noone on the line except me.

My question is, if I use a seperate ADSL account than anyone else, on a bridged connection, will my latency(ping) be affected when someone downloads torrent/whatever (not at the maximum of the line speed) on the other account?

Thanks in advance!

 

[bboy]

yes it will

 

[Tinuva]

You also need to limit the upload speed. No point in limiting the download speed while you max your upload speed.

 

[Kosmik]

Create a download server, force everyone to queue on the server for mass downloading and specify that during such times as gaming, the server will be paused.

You could also maybe get some form of QOS on your router but that might become quite tricky, especially if some clever person hides their P2P in the port of your game but you could make a virtual link for that ports traffic to go to a specific ip

 

[Srack0verflow]

yes it will

aslong as the others don't saturate the upstream with their torrents

 

[Pada]

If you dial 2 ADSL connections on the same 4Mbps ADSL link, then the total speed that you can get with those 2 accounts combined will still remain at 4Mbps.

So I don't see a point in getting/using another ADSL account. Rather limit the other people's downloads & uploads so that you have at least half of the bandwidth left for gaming. eg. 2048kbps download limit & 256kbps upload limit.

 

[davemc]

We have speculated on this before, and it would seem that packet size makes the difference.

1 Receiving : PPPOE Packet [ 4096 bytes ] <- Router in Bridge Mode <- DSLAM <- <- Internet = Router busy for ~20ms
2 Receiving : PPPOE Packet [ 0325 bytes ] <- Router in Bridge Mode <- DSLAM <- <- Internet = Router busy for ~5ms

This effectively means that the machine sending/receiving the larger packets uses up the most "line-time".

So, machine 2 will suffer 3/4 'ers more than machine 1 (using above figures), causing an unbalanced load on the line and doing heavy damage to the latency figures of machine 2.

I suggest that you try switching it to bridge mode and set the MTU on each machine to what you think the packet size is of the online game, so that there is 100% fair use of the resource.

 

[Pada]

davemc, you're right.

I'm just not sure if changing the MTU would be enough, because my router (MikroTik RB750) doesn't allow me to set it lower than 512.
The problem is that your game data packets would probably be smaller than 512 bytes in any case, with your torrents/HTTP downloads being larger than that.

If you were downloading on both accounts, then you could've throttled the speed by changing the MTU values, but I'm not sure that it would do the trick for gaming + downloading on 2 separate accounts.