[throwaway189262]

I run OpenWrt on various "trash" routers from old x86 machines to $30 new cheapo AP's. It's never left me wanting.

And SQM CAKE with IP based flows enabled is the best load balancing you will find anywhere. I've used it to make 5mbit DSL links usable for a whole office. It's magic.

The automation side is lacking, but it has SSH so you can get anything done with bash scripts and elbow grease.

Only time I might not use it is a huge installation where full automation isn't optional.

[tra3]

Is it just ip based classification? Can you reduce priority for bulk traffic to improve zoom and such?

[throwaway189262]

piece_of_cake setup script with IP based flows enabled uses both IP and Diffserv.

It depends on protocol assigned DSCP values to prioritize traffic from a single host. You can easily assign these in Linux and Windows if your app doesn't already add them, most real time stuff does.

Between hosts it does fairness based scheduling. So if two IP's are trying to use whole connection, each will get half, and any high priority services on each machine will get most of that half.

I think you will find that with IP based fairness, traditional traffic priorities don't really matter. If the connection is slow, users intuitively know to stop doing background stuff on their own machine. I've done multiple video streams + zoom calls on a 1up 6down DSL connection and these protocols all play nicely with fair bandwidth distribution since SQM CAKE keeps packet delay low.

Works extremely well, but it's CPU intensive for fast connections.

[luckman212]

Is there any fanless or near-silent hardware capable of shaping 1 gigabit? I would love to try this in my home since we've been having some trouble with zoom, Teams etc at times. Don't want a big noisy Supermicro server in my house though.

[throwaway189262]

Linksys WRT 3200 and Netgear R7800 are the fastest popular OpenWrt routers. You want a popular ones because they are usually least broken and easiest to flash. Be warned, some routers have broken 5ghz and other issues. Make sure to check the OpenWrt device page before buying. I have seen forum posts that these routers can handle 300 megabits+ but not sure about 1gig

Your best bet for such speeds is running on X86. OpenWrt runs fine on regular desktop PC if you use hardware with good Linux support. Especially be cautious of the wifi drivers/device. Or, you can traffic shape with the PC using two gigabit NIC's and leave the wireless to a "dumb AP" regular router.

So yeah for one gig shaping I think the best option is a regular X86 machine with good NIC's (Intel maybe). You can get fanless ones sold for home theatre. Or, what I recommend, use a regular PC in a cheapo case with Noctua A Series fans. Even at max speed Noctua A fans are barely audible. And you can turn them down in BIOS if you get a decent mobo

You can try it with an old machine first but make sure it at least has PCI Express. Old school PCI slots only have 1gig of bandwidth so having two (one lan, one wan) will max out the bus. My first gen core i5 750 was able to shape at 400 megabits with the bus maxed out :)

I'll add to this, to get holy grail per-ip balancing with SQM CAKE you need to enable an advanced option. See https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/... section "To enable Per-Host Isolation"

[tra3]

Yeah, I second this.

[throwaway189262]

See my reply to sister comment