[Bloat] came across an unexpected side-effect of bufferbloat

[Steinar H. Gunderson]

On Mon, Aug 03, 2015 at 11:53:40PM +1000, jb wrote:
> While researching a little I came across a message on the Amazon support
> forums that said after 3 hours of uploading to Amazon, their cable modem
> would crash and reboot. The reason was that the SNMP the cable modem needed
> to stay healthy was timing out (due to the excessive latency induced by the
> continuous uploading). The author didn't know it was bufferbloat, of course.

FWIW, you don't need bufferbloat for this to fail. A classic thing with
switches (typically underbuffered rather than overbuffered!) is that when you
run the links full, the OSPF packets get dropped and eventually your link
flaps because the other side thinks you're down.

This is one of the reasons why most L3 switches (well, anything that's
advanced enough to do OSPF or the likes in the first place :-) ) have QoS at
all: You need to protect your administrative traffic.

/* Steinar */
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