I been given the task in our local E-sports Community to deal with the networking side of things. Last weekend we arranged a lanparty, and we ran 6 unmanaged 1GB switches into one Unifi US-24 switch into on Unifi SG4Pro gateway. The internal traffic was working great, but we had some issues with bufferfloat on the wan. The connection outside is the venue’s own 1GB network (1GB down/ 1GB up). I tried to use Smartqueue, but it takes a 700MB perfomance hit. We also had a lancache-server to offload the connection as much as we could. There were 120 clients at most.
I run both a MikroTik Hap AX3 and a HapAX2 at home, with FQ Codel on my wan port with excellent results. (it solved my bufferfload according to https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat) Will this solve the bufferfloat problem, when dealing with “heavy” traffic at a lanparty. We had some packets dropped, and mostly the gamers were happy, but I feel our old SG4Pro isn’t up to the task anymore. Half of the attendants didn’t even update their games before the went to the venue, and to top it off, Epic Games dropped a update for Fortnite to make matters worse.
Next time I’m going to replace all of the
I really like to work with routerOS and Winbox, and I feel get a whole lot more bang for the buck using MikroTik devices.
The question is, what is the MikroTik equivalent router for the Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro? Our organisation is based on volunteerwork, and we don’t have crazy amounts of money to spend.
RB5009 is $175.95 on multilink.com if you create an account. The CCR2116 is $799. Shipping not included but always reasonable IMHO. I am NOT affiliated with them in any way. I’ve just used them for my Mikrotik purchases and have always found them to be very competitive.
I’ve actually considered the RB5009 or the CCR2004, but I Know the CCR2116 is the most capable of them, by just looking at the test results. But then again, the money I save on the router, I can use to buy some more managed switches.
Is the RB5009 capable of doing some load-balancing? I might have access to an additional 1GB connection.
My main priority is having low latency for gaming, and I do not mind if the download-speed is reduced.
CCR2004 gives you plenty of switch ports and more raw power to handle CPU-bound tasks like queue management to keep latency down using techniques such as fq_codel, cake, or similar. RB5009 is more suited for a home lab.
I see your point, but it is twice as expensive, and we only do need the router for one or two weekends every year, and I do not really need more than a couple of ethernet ports, as we are doing most of the switching on ubiquiti stuff. For the price of CCR2004, I could get on RB5009 and a CSS326-24G.
Does the RB5009 match the UDM Pro, in terms of perfomance with Smartqueue enabled? I feel that if I encounter some issues, I have more remedies that I can conjure with RouterOS 7 than Unifi.
We run a UDM Pro at our site, with only Unifi-gear, but we cannot take the Udm pro with us, when we are arranging lanparties, but we do take some of our unifi switches with us.
I just got home from a small gathering at our place, then I did a performance test with, and without smartqueue. 0.98Gbps (down/up) without, 0.75Gbps (down/up) with smartqueue. So it does indeed suffer such a performance hit, that I cannot fully saturate our 1Gbps wan. But then again, the Fortnite-gamers did mention that they did not experience any packet loss or high ping spikes like they use to. There were only like 10 gamers out our own site today, but then again smartqueue is sorely needed when dealing with this.
I’ll let you guys know when we decide what kind of hardware we are going for.
I highly recommend installing smokeping (even on a raspberry pi will do just fine) and add to it multiple destination hosts to constantly check the latency and packet loss of your internet feed.
I would also add some of the internet provider’s IPs to check and even the router, and other local devices as well, so you get more reliable statistics.
This would give much better visibility into what’s going on with latency and/or packet loss and how the network behaves when you change something in the QoS, when the router is overloaded etc.
It doesn’t only show the median ping times, but also the jitter (the ‘smoke’ parts of the graphs), which is a critical metric for latency sensitive traffic such as gaming.
At this lanparty I might get access to two 1Gbps ethernet connections. I have no idea what kind of gear they use etc. But is it always benificial to run two “WAN’s” with failover and loadbalancing? Will there be a double cpu tax when running queue’s on them? Or does routeros run one instance of queues, that balances that queue-trafic over two WAN’s?
Either way I bought myself another Hap Ax2 that I try my configs on, but it hasn’t arrived yet.
especially 16G variants would be great choice for LAN party environment.