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Comment by Bender | Hacker News Reader

Per the documentation it compensates for some overhead. The numbers on my hardware based on my usage patterns will not match the numbers on your hardware and your usage patterns. I have tested it on several different routers and saw a difference but by itself nothing to write home about in my testing. Just as there is the concept of a death by a thousand cuts, there are also notable improvements by adjusting each layer of the stack to be optimized for the workload. In the big picture it is enough difference for me to bother with along with a few dozen other settings especially for gaming.

I predict some day this will be one of many things that will get adjusted by the "tuned" daemon if they add a profile for routers.

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On the other hand, I can think of a lot of things I've seen done and done myself because they were "obviously" beneficial, which turned out to make no difference or be slightly harmful when I rigorously tested them.

Finding the balance is hard. I find as I get older I'm less inclined to twiddle knobs, but that isn't necessarily a universally good thing :)

Well like I said, some people like defaults because it is less cognitive load and some like to tweak things until they can't get better results. I believe that everyone should be able to choose their own path to satisfaction. If the defaults and fq_codel work for you then that is probably the right answer.

I am more curious that OpenWrt doesn't set these (demux) settings. It feels a bit like looking for advice on ZFS tuning and finding out 10 years later that what you were told was completely wrong.

For what it's worth in your example there is a 10 year time span. What anyone was told 10 years ago about most things will have evolved with time, patches, major/minor code changes so if a configuration remains static for 10 years there will ultimately be room for some improvement just as the code itself and the hardware it is running on may have also changed.

Where this concept gets a little unnerving is the medical industry. Imagine if your doctor did not stay on top of the evolution on medicine and technology. They would confidently perform the same actions and prescriptions they did a decade ago even if it was now know that those things were not only wrong but also wildly dangerous and ineffective.

At least with routers and ZFS we are hopefully not using those to save lives and in the example in this thread it is just tiny change among hundreds of changes that have evolved with only marginal gains.

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