Re: [Bloat] Rigorous Coffee Shop Bloat Testing

Re: [Bloat] Rigorous Coffee Shop Bloat Testing

[Rich Brown]

> On Sep 3, 2019, at 11:22 AM, bloat-request@lists.bufferbloat.net wrote:
> 
> The coffee shop tests were fun, but I(we) needed more rigor when doing
> them. What I'd typically do is go in,
> get on the wifi, start 6 minutes worth of tests, get in line, get
> coffee...

OK. I'll bite. What "six minutes of tests" do you queue up? What do you record?

And how do you broach the subject with the owner? Something like...

"Uh, I think I know why all those heads are popping up..." OR 
"This is a nice network you have here. It'd be a shame if something happened to it..." OR
"I know I look like [don't look like] a pointy-headed geek, but there's this thing called bufferbloat..." OR 
"Do you ever get complaints that your wifi is really slow?" 

Thanks.

Rich

Re: [Bloat] Rigorous Coffee Shop Bloat Testing

[Dave Taht]

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On Tue, Sep 3, 2019 at 8:57 AM Rich Brown <richb.hanover@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Sep 3, 2019, at 11:22 AM, bloat-request@lists.bufferbloat.net wrote:
> >
> > The coffee shop tests were fun, but I(we) needed more rigor when doing
> > them. What I'd typically do is go in,
> > get on the wifi, start 6 minutes worth of tests, get in line, get
> > coffee...
>
> OK. I'll bite. What "six minutes of tests" do you queue up? What do you record?

Still working out what the "right thing" would be. The ecn syn failure
thing was new (didn't know OSX had that stat), getting some caps,
seeing if ipv6 was available, all seem like good ideas, in addition to
bloat protection.

the most recent script was this - (the data is in my blog-cerowrt repo
on github, also).

We could turn this into a batch file and try to get more rigorous
about also getting a packet cap.

Is there a decent android or IOS tool yet?

#!/bin/sh

T="Los_Gatos_Starbucks"
F="flent -x -H flent-fremont.bufferbloat.net -t $T"

$F --te=download_streams=4 tcp_ndown
$F --te=upload_streams=4 --socket-stats tcp_nup
# $F --te=upload_streams=4 tcp_2up_square # not useful enough
$F rrul
$F rrul_be


> And how do you broach the subject with the owner? Something like...

Carefully. The owners are always ready to take a complement or
complaint, and, so long as you catch 'em when
not too busy are usually pretty social in general.

In many cases they share the wifi with their credit card reader and
when I say that fixing bufferbloat helps,
their eyes light up. That was a specific problem that at least one had
- demonstrable - I saw it take forever
to clear a transaction (and the bloat was 2+ seconds long at the time
- NOT triggered by me) once... he had a synology router, and "applying
QoS" "just worked", and we did other things like reposition the
antenna, also. got me lunch
that did and he punched a whole bunch of holes in my "repeat business" card....

However the employees usually lack the router's password and clue.

IF we were to make this a thing (and it does invoke fond memories of
how we first spread wifi around the bay area
and then the world in the early 2000s - I was part of a group called
thirdbreak that generally lept across the counter to help a lot, back
in the days we were so eager to get out of the office and onto wifi
that we were mapping all the locations available - example:
http://www.wififreespot.com/ca.php from those days...), perhaps carry
a portable printer for the test output, biz cards,  and so on for the
no-owner-present case.

I recently hit on the idea of creating stickers - attached is the one
I'm using on my guitar...

which is a bit too much over the top, I think, generally.

but plan to give out 0.0.0.0/8 and 240.0.0.0/4 ones next time.

They are cheap (I used stickermule) and with a cool logo, folk dig
adorning their laptops with them, in general. Still,
we've never found that logo/slogan for fixing bufferbloat - the word
is too long and too negative, though I thought
the inverted wifi logo we use on the cerowrt site a good start. "Better wifi".

With more folk gathering data...

Maybe (for example) we'd play off starbucks vs peets - attached is
starbucks (using google wifi) vs another coffeeshop, coffeecat - sigh.
but weirdly enough starbucks's packet cap - although very close to
what a fq_codel'd trace would look like, doesn't actually seem to be a
fq_codeled trace. Still puzzled, need to go back and try that spot
again.

And I gotta say, it's *really good* to get out of the lab once in a
while and see people, and sometimes, actually fix something, trying a
different coffee shop every week.

I guess, in the cases where the coffee doesn't become free, I could
deduct it as a business expense. :)

> "Uh, I think I know why all those heads are popping up..." OR
> "This is a nice network you have here. It'd be a shame if something happened to it..." OR

Oh, that's great! Goes with my costume, too. "Hey buddy, got an ipv6 address?"

> "I know I look like [don't look like] a pointy-headed geek, but there's this thing called bufferbloat..." OR
> "Do you ever get complaints that your wifi is really slow?"

I might also have an agenda in trying to see how much ipv6 is out
there, and the syn thing is bugging me, too.
So with a more organized set of tests, we could fan out to the coffee
shops of the world and forment another
wifi revolution and turn that world upside down! Who's with me!?

> Thanks.
>
> Rich
> _______________________________________________
> Bloat mailing list
> Bloat@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/bloat



-- 

Dave Täht
CTO, TekLibre, LLC
http://www.teklibre.com
Tel: 1-831-205-9740

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Re: [Bloat] Rigorous Coffee Shop Bloat Testing

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Tuesday, September 03, 2019 11:29 AM -0700 Dave Taht 
<dave.taht@gmail.com> wrote:

> In many cases they share the wifi with their credit card reader and
> when I say that fixing bufferbloat helps,
> their eyes light up. That was a specific problem that at least one had
> - demonstrable - I saw it take forever
> to clear a transaction (and the bloat was 2+ seconds long at the time
> - NOT triggered by me) once... he had a synology router, and "applying
> QoS" "just worked", and we did other things like reposition the
> antenna, also. got me lunch
> that did and he punched a whole bunch of holes in my "repeat business"
> card....

My favorite cafe owner would just look like a deer in the headlights over 
this. She doesn't do online at all and just provides the wifi for 
customers. I'm not sure who set it up for her. Her CC reader is dial-up.

I'm pretty new myself to hacking a consumer router so I don't know what's 
even possible. Likely her router doesn't even have any settings to deal 
with bloat. What can you do without risking breaking things and ending up 
with an angry owner?

Re: [Bloat] Rigorous Coffee Shop Bloat Testing

[Stephen Hemminger]

On Tue, 3 Sep 2019 10:29:51 -0700
Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 3, 2019 at 8:57 AM Rich Brown <richb.hanover@gmail.com> wrote:
> >  
> > > On Sep 3, 2019, at 11:22 AM, bloat-request@lists.bufferbloat.net wrote:
> > >
> > > The coffee shop tests were fun, but I(we) needed more rigor when doing
> > > them. What I'd typically do is go in,
> > > get on the wifi, start 6 minutes worth of tests, get in line, get
> > > coffee...  
> >
> > OK. I'll bite. What "six minutes of tests" do you queue up? What do you record?  
> 
> Still working out what the "right thing" would be. The ecn syn failure
> thing was new (didn't know OSX had that stat), getting some caps,
> seeing if ipv6 was available, all seem like good ideas, in addition to
> bloat protection.
> 
> the most recent script was this - (the data is in my blog-cerowrt repo
> on github, also).
> 
> We could turn this into a batch file and try to get more rigorous
> about also getting a packet cap.
> 
> Is there a decent android or IOS tool yet?
> 
> #!/bin/sh
> 
> T="Los_Gatos_Starbucks"
> F="flent -x -H flent-fremont.bufferbloat.net -t $T"
> 
> $F --te=download_streams=4 tcp_ndown
> $F --te=upload_streams=4 --socket-stats tcp_nup
> # $F --te=upload_streams=4 tcp_2up_square # not useful enough
> $F rrul
> $F rrul_be
> 
> 
> > And how do you broach the subject with the owner? Something like...  
> 
> Carefully. The owners are always ready to take a complement or
> complaint, and, so long as you catch 'em when
> not too busy are usually pretty social in general.
> 
> In many cases they share the wifi with their credit card reader and
> when I say that fixing bufferbloat helps,
> their eyes light up. That was a specific problem that at least one had
> - demonstrable - I saw it take forever
> to clear a transaction (and the bloat was 2+ seconds long at the time
> - NOT triggered by me) once... he had a synology router, and "applying
> QoS" "just worked", and we did other things like reposition the
> antenna, also. got me lunch
> that did and he punched a whole bunch of holes in my "repeat business" card....
> 
> However the employees usually lack the router's password and clue.
> 
> IF we were to make this a thing (and it does invoke fond memories of
> how we first spread wifi around the bay area
> and then the world in the early 2000s - I was part of a group called
> thirdbreak that generally lept across the counter to help a lot, back
> in the days we were so eager to get out of the office and onto wifi
> that we were mapping all the locations available - example:
> http://www.wififreespot.com/ca.php from those days...), perhaps carry
> a portable printer for the test output, biz cards,  and so on for the
> no-owner-present case.
> 
> I recently hit on the idea of creating stickers - attached is the one
> I'm using on my guitar...
> 
> which is a bit too much over the top, I think, generally.
> 
> but plan to give out 0.0.0.0/8 and 240.0.0.0/4 ones next time.
> 
> They are cheap (I used stickermule) and with a cool logo, folk dig
> adorning their laptops with them, in general. Still,
> we've never found that logo/slogan for fixing bufferbloat - the word
> is too long and too negative, though I thought
> the inverted wifi logo we use on the cerowrt site a good start. "Better wifi".
> 
> With more folk gathering data...
> 
> Maybe (for example) we'd play off starbucks vs peets - attached is
> starbucks (using google wifi) vs another coffeeshop, coffeecat - sigh.
> but weirdly enough starbucks's packet cap - although very close to
> what a fq_codel'd trace would look like, doesn't actually seem to be a
> fq_codeled trace. Still puzzled, need to go back and try that spot
> again.
> 
> And I gotta say, it's *really good* to get out of the lab once in a
> while and see people, and sometimes, actually fix something, trying a
> different coffee shop every week.
> 
> I guess, in the cases where the coffee doesn't become free, I could
> deduct it as a business expense. :)
> 
> > "Uh, I think I know why all those heads are popping up..." OR
> > "This is a nice network you have here. It'd be a shame if something happened to it..." OR  
> 
> Oh, that's great! Goes with my costume, too. "Hey buddy, got an ipv6 address?"
> 
> > "I know I look like [don't look like] a pointy-headed geek, but there's this thing called bufferbloat..." OR
> > "Do you ever get complaints that your wifi is really slow?"  
> 
> I might also have an agenda in trying to see how much ipv6 is out
> there, and the syn thing is bugging me, too.
> So with a more organized set of tests, we could fan out to the coffee
> shops of the world and forment another
> wifi revolution and turn that world upside down! Who's with me!?

There was a recent Wall Street Journal article that faster Internet doesn't mean anything.
https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/

I just thought "faster Internet just exposes your existing Bufferbloat"

Re: [Bloat] Rigorous Coffee Shop Bloat Testing

[Kenneth Porter]

On 9/3/2019 5:40 PM, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
> There was a recent Wall Street Journal article that faster Internet doesn't mean anything.
> https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/
>
> I just thought "faster Internet just exposes your existing Bufferbloat"

I hit a paywall trying to read that so I looked up the article title and 
found some interesting commentary:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/08/20/1450204/the-truth-about-faster-internet-its-not-worth-it

https://stopthecap.com/2019/08/20/wall-street-journal-says-faster-internet-not-worth-it-but-they-ignore-bottlenecks-and-data-caps/

Most people are streamers and won't fill a fat pipe. The big winners of 
fast Internet are people who want to download a huge game and play it 
quickly. But those are rare. (I'm a gamer but I'm patient and can wait a 
day to play so I'm happy to save money on a cheaper package that can be 
used for something else.)

As you say, when people report slow Internet, it's probably bloat, not 
the speed of the package. But faster packages make money for the ISPs.

Re: [Bloat] Rigorous Coffee Shop Bloat Testing

[Dave Taht]

Kenneth Porter <shiva@sewingwitch.com> writes:

> On 9/3/2019 5:40 PM, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
>> There was a recent Wall Street Journal article that faster Internet doesn't mean anything.
>> https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/
>>
>> I just thought "faster Internet just exposes your existing Bufferbloat"
>
> I hit a paywall trying to read that so I looked up the article title
> and found some interesting commentary:
>
> https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/08/20/1450204/the-truth-about-faster-internet-its-not-worth-it
>
> https://stopthecap.com/2019/08/20/wall-street-journal-says-faster-internet-not-worth-it-but-they-ignore-bottlenecks-and-data-caps/
>
> Most people are streamers and won't fill a fat pipe. The big winners

The market has shifted. With streaming becoming a thing (instead of
bittorrent), ISPs had to ensure that there was enough bandwidth during
peak hours across their entire platform to keep users from screaming.

Once everybody upgraded to "enough", because the usage pattern had
shifted, few want or need more.

> of fast Internet are people who want to download a huge game and play
> it quickly. But those are rare. (I'm a gamer but I'm patient and can

Well in the cases of shared internet, more BW (and less bufferbloat)
helps a lot. Small businesses such as coffee shops, etc. But they
are a much smaller portion of the market than the home.

It's semi-worse/semi-better than that - usage has shifted to people's
LTE phones for a lot of things, and they forget to enable wifi.

I think ISPs have shot themselves in the foot, perhaps permanently.

* By shipping buggy gear and bad wifi
* Not investing in good ipv4 and ipv6 technologies
* By having bad latency, the user experience is comparable to lte apps
* By not allowing services in the home, they've shifted to the cloud

Growth for ISPs could come from higher upload bandwidths - and I kind of
hope they start marketing "FASTER UPLOADS!" "Great Gaming!" "Killer
Videoconferencing!" "Multiple security cameras!" etc - Even a mere
doubling of upload speeds helps a lot.

... instead of doing that, some are trying to put on data caps and other
barriers to using the oversupply of bandwidth they now have with no
demand. Certainly there's a big focus on somehow delivering 4k or higher
video - and that's really not very perceptible, just a bunch a bits....

cisco just pulled out of the docsis 10Gbit effort. There's no demand.

The demand for (some) fiber exists simply because cablemodems are so
bad - and have 5x the baseline RTT as fiber does - and hype. Gfiber
and FIOS struggle. Sonic in SF, is doing well, but that's SF for you.

"DOCSIS-LL - now with lower RTTs! Buy it now!"

> wait a day to play so I'm happy to save money on a cheaper package
> that can be used for something else.)

I subsist on a really tiny amount of bandwidth, managed of course by cake.

>
> As you say, when people report slow Internet, it's probably bloat, not
> the speed of the package. But faster packages make money for the ISPs.

Nobody on the slashdot article chimed in on the bufferbloat front. But
whatever.

Back in 2012... I thought we'd basically hit "peak bandwidth" at
~40Mbit/user, and we just needed to optimize for RTTs to utilize that
always at multiple levels - be that physical rtt on link - or via
cdns - or wifi - etc.

I'd argued strenously with cablelabs that their benchmarks were wrong -
that web page growth was not exponential (avg web page size has only
doubled in 7 years) - this is a great resource:

https://httparchive.org/reports/state-of-the-web#bytesTotal

... that everything was bound by RTT - that a single queue AQM
was smoked by fq due to the reduced RTTs on bidirectional traffic...

google published a great benchmark about why RTT was so important...

https://www.igvita.com/2012/07/19/latency-the-new-web-performance-bottleneck/

and.... they didn't fix it. Took years to rollout docsis 3.1, which is
still only tiny.... better uploads rolled out first which helped on
generic RTTs....

Unless usage patterns change - fixing bufferbloat, and back to things
like torrent running all the time, or folk migrating services en-mass
back into their homes and businesses, I don't see bandwidth related
revenue growth for land-line ISPs. Sure, we'll see dsl users continue to
migrate to whatever they can, and people jump off of cable as soon as
they can get fiber... but that's due to the RTT more than the bandwidth.

I do hope - 10 years from now - someone points at what I just said and
laughs, showing their 10Gbit home fiber line saturated with brainwave to
smellovision full immersion bi-dir traffic, or something like that.

And I still hope people get out into the real world into more nice
coffeeshops, and hang out. I remember when lan parties were a thing....

Re: [Bloat] Rigorous Coffee Shop Bloat Testing

[Jonathan Morton]

> On 4 Sep, 2019, at 6:17 am, Dave Taht <dave@taht.net> wrote:
> 
> …and people jump off of cable as soon as
> they can get fiber... but that's due to the RTT more than the bandwidth.

And also due to the downright predatory pricing/billing practices of the typical cable ISP.  I think an awful lot of people would take any viable alternative at this point, purely due to that factor.  Which is why cable industry lobbyists are doing their level best to kill municipal fibre.

 - Jonathan Morton

Re: [Bloat] Rigorous Coffee Shop Bloat Testing

[Stephen Hemminger]

On Wed, 4 Sep 2019 06:24:07 +0300
Jonathan Morton <chromatix99@gmail.com> wrote:

> > On 4 Sep, 2019, at 6:17 am, Dave Taht <dave@taht.net> wrote:
> > 
> > …and people jump off of cable as soon as
> > they can get fiber... but that's due to the RTT more than the bandwidth.  
> 
> And also due to the downright predatory pricing/billing practices of the typical cable ISP.  I think an awful lot of people would take any viable alternative at this point, purely due to that factor.  Which is why cable industry lobbyists are doing their level best to kill municipal fibre.

I am convinced that all the hype about 5G will die when people see how the
ISP's in the US will want to price it. They will certainly want to charge
a premium for 5G to avoid under cutting their current overpriced service.

Re: [Bloat] Rigorous Coffee Shop Bloat Testing

[Dave Taht]

On Tue, Sep 3, 2019 at 10:49 PM Stephen Hemminger
<stephen@networkplumber.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 4 Sep 2019 06:24:07 +0300
> Jonathan Morton <chromatix99@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > On 4 Sep, 2019, at 6:17 am, Dave Taht <dave@taht.net> wrote:
> > >
> > > …and people jump off of cable as soon as
> > > they can get fiber... but that's due to the RTT more than the bandwidth.
> >
> > And also due to the downright predatory pricing/billing practices of the typical cable ISP.  I think an awful lot of people would take any viable alternative at this point, purely due to that factor.  Which is why cable industry lobbyists are doing their level best to kill municipal fibre.
>
> I am convinced that all the hype about 5G will die when people see how the
> ISP's in the US will want to price it. They will certainly want to charge
> a premium for 5G to avoid under cutting their current overpriced service.

It's not just that, but nobody knows how much or how well ipv6 will
roll out there, and I figure the 5G folk
are into double nat and massive CGNAT use overall. Gamers are going to
hate it, if it's like that.

Have the 5G folk published anything regarding their ipv6 intentions?

> _______________________________________________
> Bloat mailing list
> Bloat@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/bloat



-- 

Dave Täht
CTO, TekLibre, LLC
http://www.teklibre.com
Tel: 1-831-205-9740

Re: [Bloat] Rigorous Coffee Shop Bloat Testing

[Dave Collier-Brown]

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Off-topic, my custom phone manufacturer posted a supposed picture of the handset size they expected to use to provide acceptable cooling and battery life: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/BC-611_Radio_Transmitter-Receiver_-_National_Cryptologic_Museum_-_DSC07810.JPG

--dave

On 2019-10-04 3:05 p.m., Dave Taht wrote:

On Wed, 4 Sep 2019 06:24:07 +0300
Jonathan Morton <chromatix99@gmail.com><mailto:chromatix99@gmail.com> wrote:



On 4 Sep, 2019, at 6:17 am, Dave Taht <dave@taht.net><mailto:dave@taht.net> wrote:

…and people jump off of cable as soon as
they can get fiber... but that's due to the RTT more than the bandwidth.


And also due to the downright predatory pricing/billing practices of the typical cable ISP.  I think an awful lot of people would take any viable alternative at this point, purely due to that factor.  Which is why cable industry lobbyists are doing their level best to kill municipal fibre.


I am convinced that all the hype about 5G will die when people see how the
ISP's in the US will want to price it. They will certainly want to charge
a premium for 5G to avoid under cutting their current overpriced service.


--
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
dave.collier-brown@indexexchange.com<mailto:dave.collier-brown@indexexchange.com> |              -- Mark Twain



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