| Your router is holding ("buffering") packets in the hopes that they can be sent soon. Your measurements indicate that the router is "bloated", holding about five seconds (5,000 ms) worth of data. This gives the sending TCP algorithm the wrong impression. It's waiting to hear about a dropped packet to indicate that there's congestion. When your router holds on to those packets (instead of dropping them), the TCP algorithm doesn't get any feedback, so it keeps shoveling data into the connection. This leads to the bad state you're seeing. And that's where the advice on "What can I do about Bufferbloat?" comes in. There's no benefit to having more than one packet buffered by the router. (Hanging on to more than one packet per connection only causes the latency/lag you're seeing.) There are routers that actually check the time the router has held packets. If packets have been queued for "too long", the router discards them immediately, giving the vital feedback to the sending TCP. Those routers use the technique known as SQM (Smart Queue Management) and the fq_codel, cake, PIE algorithms to keep the queues within the router short - typically less than 5 msec. To solve your problem, investigate getting a router that implements one of those SQM algorithms. They're listed on the "What can I do..." page. I am a fan of OpenWrt (use it at home), but have installed a bunch of IQrouters and Ubuquiti devices for friends. |