[Bloat] Steam's distribution service - exceeding inbound policiers and bufferbloat

[cloneman <cloneman@gmail.com>]

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Hi,

Appologies in advance if this is the wrong place to ask, I haven't been
able to locate an official discussion board.

I'm looking for any comments on Steam's game distribution download system -
specifically how it defeats any bufferbloat mitigation system I've used.

It seems to push past inbound policers, exceeding them by about 40%. That
is to say, if you police steam traffic to half of your line rate, enough
capacity will remain to avoid packet loss, latency, jitter etc. Obviously
this is too much bandwidth to reserve.

Without any inbound control, you can expect very heavy packet loss and
jitter. With fq_codel or sfq and taking the usual recommended 15% off the
table, you get improved, but still unacceptable performance in your small
flows / ping etc.

The behavior can be observed by downloading any free game on their
platform. I'm trying to figure out how they've accomplished this and how to
mitigate this behavior. It operates with 20 http connections
simultaneously, which is normally not an issue (multiple web downloads
 perform well under fq_codel)

Note: in my testing cable and vdsl below 100mbit were vulnerable to this
behavior, while fiber was immune.

Basically there are edge cases on the internet that like to push too many
bytes down a line that is dropping or delaying packets. I would like to see
more discussion on this issue.

I haven't tried tweaking any of the parameters / latency targets in
fq_codel.

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