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Comment by imp0cat | Hacker News Reader

The Waveform Bufferbloat test page (https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat) has some recommended routers for mitigating bufferbloat, but the first recommended one (Eero) has apparently already been revised and the new version's capabilities are not as good as they once were. The second one (Netgear Nighthawk) seems to have terrible software and support.

So I'm looking for some opinions, what's your experience? Casual googling seems to suggest that the best solution to implement traffic management would either be a dedicated machine with something like OpenWRT or an all in one solution (ie. a Firewalla gold + some AP to provide wifi).

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A router you can flash with a modern OpenWRT is likely a good option. Check the project website and/or forums and/or reddit for recent recommendations. That's what I did in the past.

Personally I've moved to OpnSense: Some run it natively on a refurbished low-power SFF hardware (6000 or 7000 series Intel should be fine, or some Ryzen), so even in countries with high electricity costs that's feasible these days.

More specifically, I run OpnSense in a qemu/libvirt VM (2C of a E5-2690v4) and do WiFi with a popular prosumer APs. Mind that VMs are likely to introduce latency, so if you try this route, make sure to PCIe-passthrough your network devices to the VM - I was prepared to ditch the VM for a dedicated SFF.

One thing to keep in mind is that if your provider uses PPPoE, it is quite CPU-heavy. Moreover the netgraph-based PPPoE implementation that pfsense/opnsense uses is single-threaded. So if you have a multi-gig connection, you need a CPU with very good single-thread performance. Linux has a multi-threaded implementation, so it's probably less of an issue on OpenWrt.

Interestingly, some ARM SoCs that are worse on paper do much better because they hardware-accelerate PPPoE (e.g. recent MediaTek Filogic SoCs or some Qualcomm/Marvel SoCs). Most of those routers also use less power and have great WiFi. The downside (coming back to buffer bloat) is that they may not be able to do multi-gbit SQM.

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