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?"

Comments

Re:Cute name, no tangible problem

[NilesDonegan]

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.

Re:Go measure

[waveclaw]

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.