[Bloat] Bufferbloat glossary

[Bloat] Bufferbloat glossary

[Kenneth Porter]

I get a bit lost with all the jargon and acronyms in use on this list. Is 
there a glossary somewhere? (Ideally a wiki so we can all expand it.) I've 
picked up a lot over my years running Linux servers but this list is a good 
example of how the more you know, the more you realize how ignorant you 
are. ;)

For example, in today's message from David P. Reed I find "EDF" and "ACID". 
The rest of his post reminds me a lot of the kinds of issues one runs into 
with real-time multiplayer video games. I don't write those but I've always 
been fascinated with how they work and their limitations. (Think about how 
many high-end consumer routers target gamers who are looking for a magic 
bullet to combat the lag that just got their character 
killed.)"Videoconferencing" is really just a special case of a massively 
multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).

Re: [Bloat] Bufferbloat glossary

[Jonathan Morton]

> On 29 Mar, 2020, at 9:10 pm, Kenneth Porter <shiva@sewingwitch.com> wrote:
> 
> For example, in today's message from David P. Reed I find "EDF" and "ACID".

Those aren't standard bufferbloat jargon, but come from elsewhere in computer science.  EDF is Earliest Deadline First (a scheduling policy normally applied in RTOSes - Realtime Operating Systems), and ACID is Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability (a set of properties typically desirable in a database).

I think the main distinction between online gaming and teleconferencing is the volume of data involved.  Games demand low latency, but also usually aren't throwing megabytes of data across the network at a time, just little bundles of game state updates telling the server what actions the player is taking, and telling the player's computer what enemies and other effects the player needs to be able to see.  Teleconferencing, by contrast, tends to involve multiple audio and video streams going everywhere.

 - Jonathan Morton

Re: [Bloat] Bufferbloat glossary

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Sunday, March 29, 2020 10:23 PM +0300 Jonathan Morton 
<chromatix99@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think the main distinction between online gaming and teleconferencing
> is the volume of data involved.  Games demand low latency, but also
> usually aren't throwing megabytes of data across the network at a time,
> just little bundles of game state updates telling the server what actions
> the player is taking, and telling the player's computer what enemies and
> other effects the player needs to be able to see.  Teleconferencing, by
> contrast, tends to involve multiple audio and video streams going
> everywhere.

But most gamers DO use voice chat systems to coordinate their play with 
teammates. This might be built into the game or it might be a second 
program such as Mumble, Ventrilo, or TeamSpeak. Two-way headsets were 
popular with gamers long before one saw them used for office conferencing. 
And gamers care much more about latency than some office flunky who hears 
something a second or two later than transmitted. So their codecs tend to 
be a lot more network-friendly, trading off quality for low latency.

(Given the high bandwidth needs of video, I wonder if anyone's working on 
avatar-based meeting systems wherein one creates an avatar from one's photo 
(like Bitmoji) and uses pre-downloaded content (like video games) to 
construct low-bandwidth video streams?)