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N00b question.

How exactly does one use router quality of service settings?

I've read up on it a bit but I'm still not exactly sure how to use it. So, my real questions are these:

Generally, how does QoS work? How would one use it, say, to guarantee smooth performance in latency sensitive application (cough online gaming cough)? Performance for that sort of stuff bombs out on our connection when somebody is uploading files.

I apologize if this is kind of sprawling. Suggestions to clean it up / edits welcome.

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Google is your friend here. – Jonno_FTW Apr 24 '10 at 3:18

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After a google search for tomato router qos turned up this article on QoS on Tomato fimware routers which you may want to read.

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Whilst this may theoretically answer the question, it would be preferable to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link for reference. – Oliver Salzburg♦ Jan 18 at 13:26
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You first Classify a connection say Xbox (using its MAC address) is classified as "High".

Then you choose what percentage of Outbound and Inbound bandwidth the Classifications can receive and can send. Xbox bandwidth may be set to "None" (unlimited) or maybe you set it to 95% of bandwidth.

by the way DNS should be classed as "Highest" and set to "None" (as in no restriction) or 100% of bandwidth (otherwise webpage requests and other DNS requests may timeout).

So in this situation Xbox which is classed as "High" on the classification list gets priority over other classifications AND it gets 95% of bandwidth.

Think of it like the line outside a trendy nightclub where the regular ugly people are made to wait so they are classified as "Low" but here comes a celebrity who is classified as "High" (aren't they all!...anyway) and gets to go in before everyone.

That's a pretty simplified if not confusing attempt to explain it and I should say I could never really get it to work well on Tomato, torrents would always suck up all available bandwidth no matter what I tried.

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I think QoS works best if you "control the queue", ie. your router actually limits its usage to slightly below what your connection can handle, this way your internet provider cannot (should not, anyway) queue your packets for you, causing latency. If your connection is variable in what it can handle I think qos might not work that great.

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Is there any alternative QoS for connections that are variable in capacity over time? – endolith Nov 24 '11 at 2:45
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You will find an introduction to what QOS is on e.g. Wikipedia. For more details, The Linux Advanced Routing and Traffic Howto has an entire section devoted to implementing QOS

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