Constant high ping spikes when a stream is playing

[Gutsberzerk 2]

Hello, when a stream is playing (even just 1 movie at 6mbps), it causes high ping spikes making games unplayable. I have a decent and dedicated server, 70MB Download / 25MB Upload, and play my games on a separate PC. All wired connection. What can I do to resolve this? Thanks.

[rbjtech 5284]

4 minutes ago, Gutsberzerk said:

Hello, when a stream is playing (even just 1 movie at 6mbps), it causes high ping spikes making games unplayable. I have a decent and dedicated server, 70MB Download / 25MB Upload, and play my games on a separate PC. All wired connection. What can I do to resolve this? Thanks.

This is caused by poor queuing priority/management on the router side of things - aka 'buffer bloat' - are you using an ISP supplied router - or something half decent ?

If it's a decent router - then it may have some settings to allow quality of service or 'smart queue management' - something like that.

If you don't - then there is not a lot you can do about it as the nature of the traffic streamed is very 'peaky' - ie it will try and fill the buffer as quickly as possible, then wait and then try and fill it again, so you get a 'saw blade' effect if you look at the traffic.

if you do have QoS or smart queues, then you can deprioritise the traffic on certain ports for example - meaning your game traffic always gets priority. 

 

[rbjtech 5284]

To add and to maybe contradict my above comment - if you are streaming large bitrates close to your max upload (25 Mbit) then maybe enforce a much lower bitrate on emby - say max 10Mbit.

This will then leave you with 50% of your upload capacity (giving your game the other 50%) - but the downside, is the video stream will then need to transcode ..

Under - server > network

Edited December 2, 2022 by rbjtech

[Gutsberzerk 2]

1 hour ago, rbjtech said:

This is caused by poor queuing priority/management on the router side of things - aka 'buffer bloat' - are you using an ISP supplied router - or something half decent ?

If it's a decent router - then it may have some settings to allow quality of service or 'smart queue management' - something like that.

If you don't - then there is not a lot you can do about it as the nature of the traffic streamed is very 'peaky' - ie it will try and fill the buffer as quickly as possible, then wait and then try and fill it again, so you get a 'saw blade' effect if you look at the traffic.

if you do have QoS or smart queues, then you can deprioritise the traffic on certain ports for example - meaning your game traffic always gets priority. 

 

Hey and yeah, it's just a standard router. It that the purpose of these other fancy 'gaming' routers or whatever then, it handles traffic better? As for your other comment, I do restrict everyone to 7Mbps per user and only have like 4 users, but never all on at the same time. As obviously yeah my upload speed will be maxed out and affect performance but, in this case, not even half my upload is being used.

[rbjtech 5284]

22 minutes ago, Gutsberzerk said:

Hey and yeah, it's just a standard router. It that the purpose of these other fancy 'gaming' routers or whatever then, it handles traffic better? As for your other comment, I do restrict everyone to 7Mbps per user and only have like 4 users, but never all on at the same time. As obviously yeah my upload speed will be maxed out and affect performance but, in this case, not even half my upload is being used.

In summary yes but I don't have any direct experience of these routers (Asus Gaming router etc) as I use custom hardware for mine.  But you essentially tell the router to prioritise traffic going to your gaming PC and deprioritise traffic going to emby ..