MikroTik

Hey guys. Just got my first Mikrotik device. Using it to keep my connection a little more stable. Happy with the out-of-the-box experience. But I'm very unhappy with the stupid steep learning curve.

What I'm trying to do:

I'd like to prioritize internet access for one IP address over others. When I'm trying to game and my GF is watching videos in 4k... I suffer. Please help.

What I have tried to do:

I'm a networking noob. Assume I know nothing. After watching literally hours of youtube videos on random configs, scouring the wiki and looking at some posts on this forum I have:
- Assigned a static IP address for my computer; it's 192.168.88.236
- Created an IP Address list that contains only my computer. Lets call it Gaming PC
- Enabled IP firewall on the "bridge" interface.
- Deleted the "Fast passthrough" rule from the firewall (and restarted to make it take effect)
- Created Mangle (WTF IS MANGLE??!? That's not a word) rules to mark connections NOT to/from Gaming PC as "other-connection", and from/to as "gaming-connection". Marked the packets for those connections with "other-packet" and "gaming-packet" respectively.
- Inside Queue Trees I made a Priority 7 queue for "gaming-packet" traffic, and a priority 8 queue for "other-traffic".

What happens now?

Nothing. In the "mangle" window I see megabytes and then gigabytes flow through the "other" traffic, but it's barely kilobytes in the "queue tree" view. No clue why.

What do I need help with?

Please tell me if I missed a step in the setup. Or better yet, can you point me to a noob (from start to finish) guide for doing something like this? Literally every article I found did A LOT of classification on ports and/or protocols and enforced traffic caps and the setup looks like it's pages long. :( I want basic QOS.

Thank you.

Edit: I reset the configuration and tried the steps above again. I'm able to classify traffic now. BUT the data only shows up in the Queue Tree. Simple Queues do not work. Even if I do a no-filter simple queue I see no traffic captured there.

Now I did split the traffic in Queue Tree. But setting priority there HAS NO EFFECT. The documentation says "priority has no effect if the max limit isn't set. Which I'm not setting.

I ended up creating a mangle rule to change priority on the traffic to my machine, and it mostly works. My latency is normally ~35ms in game. But when someone is streaming videos it spikes up to 80ms. Without this rule it stays at 80ms consistently and with it it drops to ~35ms about half the time. Not sure how to make it more robust, but at least I have an appreciable difference.

Still looking for proper way to configure QoS.

Also a new RouterOS Queue user, but this may help:

As you noted, a max-limit may need to be set. I’ve noticed that to be true for simple queues.

—> Try setting the max-limits for the queues to something exceeding your actual bandwidth, say ‘500M’, and see if anything happens.

The other thing to be mindful of is where the mangle rules are set to apply (e.g. pre-routing, forward, etc.).

Alternatively, I’d also try just setting up a simple queue for your gaming computer; either way, you can set a minimum guaranteed bandwidth ("Target Upload" and "Target Download") on the first tab of the queue tree dialog and on the second tab of the simple queue dialog (at least in WinBox).

If you’re using IPv6 with SLAAC (or anything but static host addresses), queueing can get much more complex, as addresses can change (including ‘temporary addresses’, up to a new one every ten minutes on Windows 10 hosts) frequently.

(P.S. You may also have to turn off the ‘hardware-queue-only’ option on your bridge interface ... not sure if that’s necessary, but it can’t hurt to toggle it while watching your counters to see if you notice a change. Finally, I believe queues may only apply to new connections in some cases, so while testing you may have to reload your game or reload a website to see if changes [other than bandwidth-limit changes] to queueing are having an impact.)