So… you’ve probably noticed that when downloading a game or doing serious p2p piracy, your internet latency suffers: websites take longer to load, video chats stutter, online games glitch.

Well, good news! You can do something about that if you have a router capable of running the free OpenWrt firmware.

The problem of downloads (or uploads) clogging up the pipes is called bufferbloat. Basically, there’s a traffic jam somewhere, usually where your ISP throttles your internet speed. This means data packets have to queue up behind whatever data is clogging up the pipes, and so they get delivered with a noticeable latency.

Some boffins have looked at that and identified ways to improve the situation:

1. Have shorter buffers, so stuff cannot queue up as much.
2. Create express lanes where other traffic can skip the queue of Final Fantasy asset deliveries.
3. Tell the Final Fantasy asset delivery service to slow the fuck down.

Unfortunately, the queuing policy and the size of the buffers coming into your home is controlled by the ISP, so you can’t really do much about that, but you can actually do #3.

This works by setting a speed limit on the OpenWrt router in your home, which tells anyone sending too much shit your way to slow down, which means the buffer on the ISPs side never get full, and therefore no traffic jam! You won’t even notice you’re downloading Final Fantasy. The web browsing and video chatting will feel like there’s no download going on at all. You got to set the bandwidth limit 10-20% below your actual internet speed though, which I think is well worth it.

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/sqm