Hi everyone!
I recently successfully traced some network issues I was having in Counter Strike back to my QBittorrent client having too many open connections. Global maximum was set to around 500, with a 100 max per torrent. This caused major jitter and packetloss in-game.
My current router is an Asus N18U which has Asus-Merlin on it.
The issues kept coming back even with a smaller number of open connections to the point I had to shut down the client.
I can’t remeber having these kinds of issue on Windows (current system CachyOS wit latest kernel), but I can ne wrong.
For what kind of specs should I be looking in a router for this kind of task? Would a MikroTik hEX refresh (upgraded RAM and CPU) be enough or overkill?
Thanks!
That’s unusual behaviour for a torrent client. Even on a very popular torrent, I see between 50 and 80 connections.
Make sure you are enforcing encryption and not accepting unencrypted peer connections.
That aside, the hexs (refresh) will be plenty, assuming you have symmetric upload/download. I have an old Hex (no SFP) I use to cordon off my storage network from anything but my servers, and it passes the full 940mbps (no jumbo frames).
You may want to check what is happening with your torrent client with top and iotop. Did you give torrents queue preference or something like that? They should not be interfering with other traffic that aggressively.
It is beyond weird. I’ve spent months trying to pinpoint the issue. I changed kernels, distros, cable, reinstalled every piece of software I could. As for Qbittorrent. I haven’t changed a single setting since installing it. The only thing I did was enable port-forwardung in my router’s software for the client. As for queue preferences, are you refering to QoS and such? I didn’t mess with it, since some posts suggested hampered speeds due to poor software optimization.
[Edit]: download and upload aren’t symmetrical. My part of town doesn’t have any fiber infrastructure, so I am stuck on copper cables with about 120Mb/s tops, and 1/10 of that for upload.
You might (read: likely) have traffic shaping upstream of you doing something as well. You can test for that at sites that measure buffer bloat.
In that case, you can implement some kind of queing management like fq_codel to help with this.
I alteady did that and the site measured an increase somewhere between 20ms and 50ms, but in-game it would frequently go up to +100ms. I have almost no onowlegde in the domain of networking, so going for a hardware solution is easier in my case.