Video suggestion Pf sense + traffic shaper

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1

Hi Tom and crew, many thanks for all the informative videos you guys make.
I would love to see a video about traffic shapers in PFsense.
I run a small company from home regarding architectural visualizations. We deal with a lot of data which is synced between remote servers and downloaded by clients using We Transfer. Although basic Traffic Shaping is enabled, we still feel sluggish internet connections when up- or downloading big files. For example when my colleague is working from home via Parsec (wired) on the company’s PC (wired) and some one is downloading files within the company, Parsec struggles with the connection.
Besides the company we have upgrowing kids who watch online tv shows, listen over Sonos to their favourite music, play games and have to follow online classes due to the pandemic.
Our ISP provides as theoretical with a download speed up to 300 Mbps and an upload speed up to 30 Mbps. Besides the company’s LAN, we have two virtual LANs running to spilt up private/ guest and company traffic.
What do you think is this worth a video?

Kind regards

Johan

2

Oh boy that’s a big topic I can see why Mr Lawrence hasn’t tackled it :slight_smile:

But this dude has, it’s pretty good and skull crushing at the same time, have a look at Comprehensive Guide to pfSense 2.3 Part 9: Traffic Shaper - YouTube

3

It’s on my to do list, but not anytime soon due to the complexities The Mark Furneaux video referenced above is the best guide.

4

I use limiters to equally split traffic among users. You can further fine tune using pipes. Most of my users don’t see any performance issues, even with a 75/15 connection (40+ users). Once I dialed in the tunning for my location, it works really well.

5

I think the challenge isn’t the what but rather the how !

1 Like
6

Yep, I am just saying it’s a very powerful feature to understand and use to improve the overall user experience in places with insufficient bandwidth.

7

I need to get my head around how to allow any device / vlan to saturate all available bandwidth until another device requires it. That sounds kinda optimal but presents a challenge, then combine it with what I’ve done to address buffer bloat.

8

This is a good guide for basic equal sharing of bandwidth. This allows one device to use up all the bandwidth until another device requests it. However, the other device requesting the bandwidth will not be able to use more than half. So if you have 60 megabit download and all three devices are downloading, all three will only be able to use only 20 megabits. If one finishes downloading, the other two will speed up to 30 megabits each, and so on. These limiters support CoDel, which can address your bufferbloat requirement.

9

Yeah I am aware of Mark Furneaux his video. But I hoped that now 5 years later, traffic shaping would have reached the next level. I will have a look into David his suggestions and recheck my Traffic Shapping settings.

10

I believe Marks video delved into ALTQ traffic shapers and not limiters (dummynet). It’s been a number of years since I’ve seen his video on Traffic Sharping, so I might not be remembering correctly.

One thing to note, you can use limiters and the ALTQ traffic shaper together to have optimal results.