I have 600Mbit/s down and 100Mbit/s up connection. My router is FritzBox 6660 Cabel. I run my nodes with Ubuntu Laptop, that is connected to the router with ethernet cable. I use uPNP connection type. I have also tried with “Home Network” some time ago for a while, but I don’t know if it helped with my situation.
Nodes seem to be running fine, but they seem to cause some problems for other uses of the connection: Video streaming services has some lag and glitches, and video calls may be unworkable…
It goes about like this:
3 nodes, Streaming OK, Video calls OK.
6 nodes, Streaming OK, Video calls some small glitches.
9 nodes, Streaming OK’ish, Video calls too undpredictable.
12 nodes Streaming Lagging, Video calls destroyed.
These are ballpark figures, especially regarding Video calls. Those are usually work -related and too important to risk with any tests. It seems though, that Teams -meetings over laptop suffer more than Whatsapp video calls over phone. Or, now that I think of it, maybe I have assigned the Whatsapp problems to the other party, while in reality they might have been because of my end.
Unfortunately I have not been able to monitor what has been actually going on with my nodes at the time when the problems occur. Is there lot’s of data going up or down when the problems occur, are there some chages in the number of connections, etc. In general it seems that the traffic related to the nodes is pretty low in both directions.
Also, I don’t know if the nodes cause problems only to the other uses of the connection, or maybe to each other, too?
These problems have ruined at least one important Teams meeting of my spouse, and thus I’m now down to running only 3-6 nodes, even though I could in principle run 12 with this laptop.
I’ve seen similar problems reported by some members, in various topics, but I think this problem is worthy of it’s own topic. Have You seen similar things? Do You have more observations to give more detail to the picture?
I also have a Fritzbox, but a different type (7590 AX). I also had HUGE connection problems, even 5 nodes would cause problems on Teams video streams.
But this has all been solved! I am now running 15 nodes without issues since 3 days or so. I am not sure in which node version this was addressed (must have been 0.3.4 or 0.3.5) , as I cannot find any associated item in the release notes.
I did not change anything else, so I suggest you check your version and stop & restart your nodes just in case. Then try adding some more nodes to see if you still have the issue.
My spouse is going to have a Teams -meeting in couple of hours, so I could whip up a few more nodes…
Seriously though, is there any other way to test this, than to risk a meeting? I’m a bit suspicious about the improvements you are seeing, as we don’t know how much the problems are due to somewhat random network load, and variation there. You might just have been lucky.
0 nodes here - 20mbit uplink - I (/the others) freeze repeatedly in teams meetings and I miss words in conversations; not possible to work with any nodes running in the same network …
I have the same experience even with 1Gbps UP/DOWN internet and Mikrotik router. I can run like 75 nodes on my 2 old Ubuntu laptops.
Unfortunately, it affects my other activities on the network. I don’t do video calls but general browsing is sometimes too laggy.
But to be honest - I also blamed myself for this. I didn’t have much time yet to play with the Mikrotik and do some optimization. I just bought it recently and my internet link is new, too. I kind of expected that 1Gbps internet with Mikrotik will do everything out of the box Probably not the case…
The most annoying thing for me is that the problems appear every now and then, and are somehow weird compared to other problems I see in our network. Unpredictable, and very difficult to know if my mitigations are helping. Hard to know the number of nodes I can run problem free.
my setup is like this - 1Gbps > Mikrotik. From Mikrotik > 2 Laptops & 1 WiFi router. It may be possible the Wifi router is the bottleneck for my browsing. I still have to dig deeper into this, it really is a fresh setup and I expect the problem to be somewhere on my side. I just wanted to let you know I have similar issues.
If you have a mikrotik router then it is a simple matter to set up a queue that will limit the nodes computer in upload speed and buffer any thing over that speed till it settle down again. As long as you allow enough uplink speed in the queue for the queue buffer to empty at times then its fine.
I have this on mine and experience no interruptions even when the queue has to buffer a few MBytes of packets.
I guess this is maybe about how fast is autonomi network, I mean people or devs wants speed and stable network, but then there is maybe low space for other home network uses, or no?
But when I have been watching the system resources, there hasn’t really been that much data movement up or down, on the contrary, the network has been quite idle for most of the time.
Then again, I don’t have any method for systematic data collecting though, so I don’t know what exactly has been going on during these problems.
I’m worried that when up- and downloading becomes truly accessible for all, these problems may become worse.
On a gigabit up and down Internet connection using the Mikrotik RB5009 gigabyte router, what size limit of upload speed would you recommend applying to each PC running 50 nodes? Would 12Mbps be enough? Should I limit the download speed as well?
If we want something definitive, I could potentially switch the old fritz.box back in an run the same tests. I suspect the differences would be pronounced.
FritzBox 6660 Cabel isn’t great I’m afraid- it’s very limited on free memory and CPU after kernel, and webgui loads in it’s 1GB memory. Also while port 1 Network is dedicated hardware, the other 4 network ports (?) are shared memory/cpu with system Interestingly, the Wifi has it’s own controller, so you “might” get better using Wifi connection - I guess they expect all home users to connect on Wifi (?)
Thoughts;
1 - Swap out the router, other Fritzboxes have more memory 2GB+ and better CPU’s - it’s an ancient CPU, so maybe speek to the ISP to see if you qualify for a free upgrade - If you need to pay anything, go look for a better Router [Intel N100 is very capable if you fancy DIY, or devices like Mikrotik if you looking more professional, or if you want fun then Rpi4/5 with VLan’s would also cover your asymmetric link]
2 - You can run a separate VPN / Router behind the Fritzbox to tunnel out from the nodes - it will add a bit of latency, but as that metric isn’t used in the nodes, there won’t be any impact - All the Fritzbox will see is the single VPN tunnel, however there will be $$ for subscriptions so maybe option 1 is cheaper long term.
3 - Install some monitoring on the Ubuntu Laptop, while I know this isn’t popular with some, if you run the local only, no cloud, no agent, opensource variant, you get a very nice historical dashboard about the Ubuntu box, NetData Opensource version [make sure to pass in, --disable-telemetry ] you might find other things you not aware of running on Ubuntu. Quick demo available, select the bottom right access anonymously.
Thanks for your views, but swapping the router is not an option for me. It’s not from the ISP, so would cost me money. The one I originally got from them, was even worse. I bought this one in a hurry last spring, when the Beta was starting.
Also, the gap from what I can run now, compared to what I have lying around, ready to use is not that large. So, I think I’m going to wait some time still, if some changes in the software would make it better.
And I’m not familiar with DIY router stuff. If it was only me, I might give it a go, but as there are other members in the family, I need a solution that can be easily and quickly fixed / reset. DIY with poor skills would just lead in a situation where, in the face of problems, others are righly nagging at me, and I don’t know how to fix it.
out of curiosity, which one did they give you originally ? you might be able to load OpenWrt on to it safely for testing, without impacting what you have.
But yeah, completely understand, breaking internet could be bad, especially if others use it.
With that I had occasional problems with just a normal streaming without any Safe/Autonomi -related stuff. Also I found a lot of discussions by unhappy customers detailing similar problems. Also, when reading the reviews of my Fritzbox, they were very positive, but of course just by your average users. A few of them were naming that specific Fritzbox beating the problems they had with the said Sagemcom.
I guess the process above is quite typical for non skillful customers solving problems they don’t understand. That, or phone call to friend or relative… as probably quite many of you skilled folks know, and have become fed up with.
I am now running 15 nodes without issues since 3 days or so. I am not sure in which node version this was addressed (must have been 0.3.4 or 0.3.5) , as I cannot find any associated item in the release notes.
Probably not the case…
Interestingly, the Wifi has it’s own controller, so you “might” get better using Wifi connection - I guess they expect all home users to connect on Wifi (?)
] you might find other things you not aware of running on Ubuntu. Quick demo available, 