sqm-scripts VS pfSense

The little ~$150 Celeron mini-PCs with 4 network ports on AliExpress can generally handle routing close to 2.5Gb linespeed - basic routing doesn't take a whole lot of horsepower. Adding in VPN, SQM, and other features like that will take more power though.

Smart Queue Management. https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/cerowrt/wiki/Smart_Queue_Management/

ISPs can do things to help with stuff like buffer bloat, but most customers are looking for the best speeds which they define in Mbps and it's not always a simple task - TCP was generally made for throughput not responsiveness. Maybe hook up your own router with smart queue management - and be prepared to sacrifice a bit of throughput for it (https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/cerowrt/wiki/Smart_Queue_Management/)

For me they reduced dramatically by addressing bufferbloat. Seems that latency causes eve client to disconnect, so by having proper routing algorithms the latency spikes should disappear even under heavy use. Some routers have these algorithms by default, but you can install them on any compatible router with a custom OS.

SQM is a combination of techniques: https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/cerowrt/wiki/Smart_Queue_Management/ which includes shaping, fair queuing, and aqm, and even to small extent, qos. SQM uses htb, drr++ like FQ, codel, and diffserv to do all it's magic.

One option is Firewalla Gold Plus, or you could buy a mini PC like it and run pfSense/OPNsense yourself.

Download and install pfsense as a virtual machine or partition: https://www.pfsense.org Configure it with the rules you want: https://youtu.be/VAGFGppSt74 Play with it, but be careful because it will block all traffic unless you check everything properly.

Another option is Firewalla, or buy a mini PC like it and run pfSense/OPNsense yourself. Two similar concepts, with the cost being either money or your DIY time. A lot of Firewalla users say that it's much easier for home use than pfSense/OPNsense, so you might find it worthwhile to spend a little more on it upfront and have to tinker less.

If you want firewall, I think you can use https://www.pfsense.org/ or https://opnsense.org/ , maybe running on an old PC or a Raspberry Pi. Not sure.

I've recently started using OPNsense. It's similar to pfSense, but seems to be considered a little more user-friendly.

For most router issues, I recommend people always put them in to dumb bridge mode and put a proper firewall like pfsense or opnsense as your gateway.

I have found that my historical average packet loss is about 0.02%. Something distinctly changed around 4/20 of this year, and now the average packet loss has gone up to 0.05% with spikes even higher, associated with periods of elevated ping times. It rarely did that before. Typically the IPv6 stack has more problems than v4 (especially an incident of packet loss on 4/28), and neither has been trouble-free since I started service in early 2020. My data comes from a pfSense installation.

I have done this using the Pfsense