[systox]

Thanks for taking the time to help me. I'm a very light user and am stumped. I've recently purchased a ROKU streaming player (http://www.roku.com/) and installed it on my network. This device is used to stream 720p netflix content wirelessly to one TV in the household. I have two computers hardwired to the router and a cellphone connected wirelesly. My internet connection is rated at 10,000 kb/s dl and 1000 kb/s upload. Whenever my roku is on and streaming a show, I experience latency spikes on the other computers of about 35ms every ~10 seconds in games such as league of legends or team fortress. I wanted to fix this problem by throttling the roku's bandwidth. I set up nat/qos and tried to set it to the lowest bandwidth priority by its mac address. This changed nothing. I then tried setting its bandwidth by ip address, but i still get lag spikes on the PCs. I've tried to contact roku support about it but they have not been particularly helpful. Is there any other way you can think of that i can throttle this thing so that network performance on the PC's is not affected while it streams?

Thanks again!

[Dougz]

Here's a couple thoughts along the lines of general troubleshooting, since I don't have much expertise with DD-WRT.

Is it possible to bump the QOS priority of the other PCs at the same time as you lower the priority of the Roku box?

There is an overclock option in some DD-WRT FWs. I think I remember there is one in the version I'm using in my 54GV5. Maybe a faster clock would result in shorter lapses and give a clue.

Is it possible to set ROKU for a lower quality video.

Some FWs have an option to give higher priority to video streams.

If any or all seem to offer some improvement, maybe a faster router is in order. I get excellent video quality from Netflix on a 3300 kbps connection, but nobody else is using the connection.

[Murrkf]

His problem is not ability to throttle. It's inability to keep that router from throttling everything. It is too weak to do what he wants.

[systox]

Hey guys, after a little research i've found a blog post that explains my problem verbatim:

"http://markmaunder.com/2011/01/26/how-to-reliably-limit-the-amount-of-bandwidth-your-room-mate-or-bad-office-colleague-uses/"

This particular tidbit is particularly relevant:

"The problem arises because of the way most streaming movie players download movies. They don’t just do it using a smooth 1 megabit stream. They’ll suck down as much as your connection allows, buffer it and then use very little bandwidth for a few seconds, and then hog the entire connection again. If you are using SSH and you hit a key, it takes a while for the router to say: “Oh, you wanted some bandwidth, ok fine let me put this guy on hold. There. Now what did you want from me again? Hey you still there? Oh you just wanted one real-time keystroke. And now you’re gone. OK I guess I’ll let the other guy with a lower priority hog the bandwidth again until you hit another keystroke.”"


The website goes on to detail a possible but complex (for me) solution. My question is, is there an easier way to accomplish the same effect? Secondly, if not, will this method work for my router?

[buddee]

In a nut shell, you need to upgrade your router to be able to do what you are wanting to do.

[barryware]

you can limit your bandwidth on the netflix site.

depending on which roku device you have, I have a couple of roku 2 (XS), which allows you to install a micro sd card.

If a card is installed, it will buffer the whole movie and never use the internet again during the display.

As others have stated, your router does not have the horse power to effectively use any type of QOS.

It is not the routers processor speed, it has more to do with the fact that your router has 8mb of ram. After rom is shadowed to ram upon boot, you have about 5mb of ram left. After it runs for a bit, when you check you will see that you have 0.3mb of ram unused.

[systox]

thanks for the help everyone. I'm going to try the sd card method you just mentioned. Very cool of you all the chime in .

[barryware]

[systox]

Oddly enough, I swapped the security method from wep to wpa2 and went through and disabled cia2 overclocking on my PCs. Apparently the auto overclocking method can screw with programs which constantly talk over the network. In any case the lag spikes are gone even if i have netflix streaming on two devices at the same time. O_o. It raises my latency a bit when there's a network overload but its no longer in spikes. If anyone comes along with the same problem, I hope this helps them out.