Traffic Shaping

Hyperpolymath · May 28, 2020

I've been hearing a lot about this and all the research about how it is good, like example the stuff that the company cFos with cFosSpeed does, and similar things on Mac. It seems to be pretty serious, and well thought through, and seems to have very little by way of problems, but then why not implemented as a standard? Is it really costly or does it have serious downsides, or incompatibilities?

Is this really a serious thing, does it work and how does it work, and if so, why isn't it already included as a standard thing on computers. I'm not sure if it is the same as the thing about Package Coalescing that seems to be an option on the adapter menu for my network cards, or Quality of Service on the router, or the thing that is in the Xbox tab in Windows 10 settings, but it's this something that you could go through on the show? And how does it relate to jitter and ping versus speed priority?

Sorry if this is a really obvious thing, I am not really sure how this fits together or if this stuff is related. And not sure how realistically something that seems to be really evidence based isn't a default.

Thank you for anyone that can help, and if this can be covered it would be really useful!

The Flying Sloth · May 28, 2020

wut

The_russian · May 28, 2020

I wasn't sure what you meant by traffic shaping, but I looked into it a bit and from what I got it is a QoS technique, which is why you don't see an option specifically for it.

Fishscene · May 29, 2020

- QoS (Quality of Service)

- Traffic Shaping

2 terms, essentially the same thing, but with a bit of history:

Traffic Shaping is a kind of "consumer level" term for QoS. The term got a really bad rap in the early days of bittorrent because ISP's in the United States were horrified folks were using the bandwidth sold to them. So the ISP's started using "Traffic Shaping" to punish/slow down their customers who used Bittorrent. This slowed the ENTIRE internet connection for the affected customer and enough of a stink was raised about it that the ISP's had to back off and figure out a better way. That better way was being able to identify individual packets and place them in to the lowest-tier processing category using QoS.

QoS is the superior traffic shaping method to whatever the heck the ISP's were first using back then.

Computers DO in fact have the ability to set QoS, but it can be very complicated and it's best left to professionals working in professional environments. Setting up QoS for Skype on your home computer will bring you basically 0 benefit even when it is working properly. You'd also need to set up your router and switch to pay attention to the QoS flag on the packets - and then it's completely ignored once it hits the Internet.

Need to guarantee a good Skype call while transferring files over a VPN connection to your house? Yea, QoS may help in that regard because you're in control over the 2 endpoints of the VPN - it won't help once the packet exits your network and hits the open internet to reach the Skype servers though. But it's the VPN that's the bottleneck here.