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Is Your Internet Connection Free From Bufferbloat? (blogspot.com)
Bufferbloat is that "undesirable latency that comes from a router or other network equipment buffering too much data," according to the site for
an ongoing project trying to address it. Now long-time Slashdot reader mtaht writes:Inside the lede-project, two core new bufferbloat-fighting techniques are poised to enter the linux mainline kernel and thousands of routers -- the first being a fq-codel'd and airtime fair scheduler for wifi, and the second, the new "cake" qdisc, which outperforms fq_codel across the board for shaping inbound and outbound connections.
His submission ends with a question for Slashdot readers. "It's been nearly six years since the start of the bufferbloat project. Have you or has your ISP fixed your bufferbloat yet?"
His submission ends with a question for Slashdot readers. "It's been nearly six years since the start of the bufferbloat project. Have you or has your ISP fixed your bufferbloat yet?"
DSL is unfortuantely the best internet connection in the small town I live in. The upload rate of these connections is really slow, and for large uploads, can saturate the connection. What this translates to in the real world is constant complaints from people about how their internet connection has just died for no good reason. What's happening in 99% of these cases is that some iPad in their house is backing up to iCloud, and bufferbloat from this upload is temporarily wiping out download speeds.
What I did was install the OpenWRT firmware on my TP-Link router, and install the SQM (Smart Queue Management) QoS application on it. This shapes uploads so that bufferbloat is greatly reduced. I tested all of this on DSLReport's Bufferbloat page, and it works great.
With dislreports and other aggregation tests, the bloat for download and upload may not be symmetric. So the resulting score might not be as good as it looks.
Paying for a commercial connection? Test for this kind of performance daily and scream as soon as it drops. Otherwise why bother to pay so much?
In the United States and other jurisdictions a home 'customer' user is not expected to run a "server" on their paid for Internet connection. Downloads may be finely tuned to low bloat. But upload may have significant bufferbloat, caps and gradual dropout. For financial reasons, of course.
This upload problem may get to be much worse in the future. More and more services push data from "client" devices in the home or office. Camera phone videos, twitch streams, shared google docs and your home automation spyware upend the upload/download assumptions of last-hop telcos. P2P is impacted now. The highly asymmetric buffering of uploads is detectable using protocols like bittorrent that don't have client-server separation.
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
Buffers are not a problem for latency, the growing internet is. Back in the early 2000s from a particular place in Europe to the west coast in US we averaged over 220ms RTT because it was going up to a satellite, landing in Newark and then traveling over 4 hops to the west coast. Around 2003 when we switched to fiber we got down to about 110ms, with the fiber going via two landing stations on the north shore of Africa, then via France via the Atlantic Ocean to Maine (or dalaware) then over land to the west coast. That was something like 12 to 14 hops.
As the years passed newer and faster fibers were put in place, but also more routers were added to branch the backbone more. Now the same geographic location in Europe to the west coast of US is again at 220ms RTT, because the hop count is around 36. Almost 3 times more routers today than 14 years ago. This is where the latency problem comes from - packet switching in the multitude of hops and MPLS tunnels that you don't even see, not from some imaginative buffers.