f13.net

Ok, i am desperately in need of some help with my router, specificly involving packet or port priorities.

I know about port forwarding and the basics, what i need to know is if there is any way to give my computer, or maybe just a few ports / apps on my computer a higher (or possibly the highest) priority on network traffic over my router.

Using a Linksys WRT54g with the Tomato (http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato/) thrid party firmware.

My problem is that basicly any time my roommate decides he wants to watch streaming TV or Fire up his Bittorrent client, my WoW connection (and sometimes other apps like ventrillo) go strait into the shitter.  Im talking i go from 100 ms Vent ping and 150-200 ms WoW pings to consistant ping rates of nearly 4 to 8 times that amount, making the game nearly unplayable.

Does anyone know what i need to do to force the router to give my tiny bit of WoW and Vent network traffic a high enough priority that his big stream downloads dont shit all over my connection?

Tomato QoS setup (http://www.decimation.com/markw/2007/10/03/tomato-qos-setup/)

Or, you know, just log into the router and disable the forwarding while your playing. Works great provided you're the only admin. "Hmmm dunno what's up. I'll take a look at it as soon as I log out."  :awesome_for_real:

EDIT: Mostly kidding, but somewhat serious. In my neighborhood despite being in the city we have shitty cable providers and cheap DSL, but the DSL is between 3MBS and 4 MBS depending. When the girl wants to watch streaming UK or AUS video on the TV or download ancient British tv torrents my MMOG connection literally dies. We've reached a compromise but for a while there I was time limiting her torrent/video activity by killing the ports. QoS helps, but for me on my Linksys it still had severe stuttering, packet drops.

EDIT2: spelling

The problem is most likely that you're saturating your upstream, especially with bittorrent shenanigans going on.  A saturated upstream makes even your downloads go to hell, because your throttled ACK packets are slow to get through.  So I'd prioritize throttling the upstream and give priority to acks.

Good point  - if you're on shitty consumer DSL/Cable your upstream is probably way way lower than your downstream. Having just tried to get this tuned myself I found that my 5MPS DSL was actually 3.6 - 3.8 down - which is not bad - but upstream was <1 - 1.2. I might try tweaking that further.

I use ancient Hyperwrt + Thibor firmware and it does decent job with QoS. My SO can and does watches shows on Hulu without preventing me from playing.

Trick? I am hard wired into router and everything else is wireless.