I see that recommendation and disregard it. I have gigabit downstream, and docsis3 modem, that has its own qos, and yet, SmartQueues definitely help — as evidenced even by ubiquiti’s own latency graph.
I’m confused. Didn’t you not enable SmartQueues? Or do you have horrible latency with SmartQueues enabled? Do you have correct limits set there?
Those are the symptoms with Smart Queues disabled.
I have 1Gbps down and 110Mbps up on this particular line. I still don’t understand how I can be getting “symptoms” when the downstream is barely half saturated (and even less than that for the upstream)
I’ve just enabled Smart Queues on that line and give it a day or so and see if it makes a difference.
In the meantime I’m upgrading the other line to 1Gbps symmetrical and see if I can shift more nodes to that one when the upgrade comes through 
it can be possible, that providers oversell there capabilities. You can go up to gigabit for short time, if if you use traffic all the time non stop, other users also use it, in some level the pipe is small. Providers sell usually several 500 Mbit, but main line only gigabit for them all, that people dont use it together on full speed. I like with electricity, you have in apartments 3x25Amps, but on fool with 5 apartments only 3x64Apms main switch for all of them.
Well, this is GPON, so yes, there will be contention on the lines. But I see the same traffic pattern for the whole 24 hours of the day.
If it was just contention with user users I should see better performance during off-peak hours.
I am not willing to test that hypothesis by getting a Leased Line connected to my house 
The second line is based on XGS-PON so when that goes up to gigabit I will be interested to see what happens
There is no normal/nominal traffic, the usage depends on the customers. Your node might be lucky to got a piece of a very popular file and if your node is fast enough to keep up and would be always a winner in the node selection and got a maximum allowed upstream bandwidth for the month 24/7. In that case the usage might be (Your upstream bandwidth) * (24 * 3600 * 30) / 1TB.
Тут нет нормального или номинального трафика, потому что использование зависит от клиента, а не от железа. Вашему узлу может повезти получить кусочек очень популярного файла и оказаться настолько быстрым, чтобы всегда выигрывать при выборе узлов для скачивания клиентами. В этом случае максимальное использование может оказаться равным вашей восходящей пропускной способности использованной в течение месяца 24/7.