[Bloat] Failure to convince

[richard <richard@pacdat.net>]

I had an email exchange yesterday with the top routing person at a local
ISP yesterday. Unlike my exchanges with non-tech people, this one ended
with him saying Bufferbloat was not a problem because... 

"I for for one never want to see packet loss.  I spent several years
working on a national US IP network, and it was nothing but complaints
from customers about 1% packet loss between two points.  Network
engineers hate packet loss, because it generates so many complaints.
And packet loss punishes TCP more than deep buffers.

  So I'm sure that you can find a bunch of network engineers who think
big buffers are bad.  But the trend in network equipment in 2010 and
2011 has been even deeper buffers.  Vendors starting shipping data
centre switches with over 700MB of buffer space.  Large buffers are
needed to flatten out microbursts.  But these are also intelligent
buffers."

His point about network people hating packet loss points up the problem
we'll have with educating them and the purchasing public that at least
some is necessary for TCP to function.

Not having been in charge of a major backbone recently, I have to admit
that my understanding of today's switching hardware was to be able to
deal with everything "at wire speed" with cut-through switching, unlike
the store-and-forward typical switches and routers at the consumer
level.

richard

-- 
Richard C. Pitt                 Pacific Data Capture
rcpitt@pacdat.net               604-644-9265
http://digital-rag.com          www.pacdat.net
PGP Fingerprint: FCEF 167D 151B 64C4 3333  57F0 4F18 AF98 9F59 DD73