The phenomenon is called "lava flow", and is a classic anti-pattern illustrated at http://antipatterns.com/lavaflow.htm Their approach to fixing is ancient, though: there are correctness-preserving refactorings for some of the problem space. Alas, I don't know if middleboxes are correctable... maybe if they are ones which only care about the IP layer? --dave On 04/04/18 08:45 AM, Jesper Louis Andersen wrote: > On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 5:04 PM Jim Gettys > wrote: > > ​To get to really good RTT's (with low jitter), you still need > ​fq_codel (or similar).  You just can't get there by hacking TCP > no matter how hard you try... > > > I agree with you on all points here. However, any change which patches > an existing bad system is far more likely to win in the long run, also > if it is bad in some way. Momentum is a killer of good solutions. I > wish I had a ramification for this observation, but I currently don't. > > My hunch is that every new generation of young programmers wants to > put their mark on the system. As a result, they take what worked well > on level N-1 and proceed to build N on top of it. But the beanstalk > never withers, so each level is present in said stack, still, after > all these years. > > (Aside: The codel approach also has worked really well for me > internally in Erlang systems as a way to maintain queue load. Far > better than many other flow control schemes). > > > _______________________________________________ > Bloat mailing list > Bloat@lists.bufferbloat.net > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/bloat -- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb@spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain