[Bloat] DSLReports Speed Test has latency measurement built-in

Fri May 8 00:16:23 EDT 2015

On Fri, 8 May 2015, jb wrote:

> I've made some changes and now this test displays the "PDV" column as
> simply the recent average increase on the best latency seen, as usually the
> best latency seen is pretty stable. (It also should work in firefox too
> now).
>
> In addition, every 30 seconds, a grade is printed next to a timestamp.
> I know how we all like grades :) the grade is based on the average of all
> the PDVs, and ranges from A+ (5 milliseconds or less) down to F for fail.
>
> I'm not 100% happy with this PDV figure, a stellar connection - and no 
> internet congestion - will show a low number that is stable and an A+ grade. A 
> connection with jitter will show a PDV that is half the average jitter 
> amplitude. So far so good.
>
> But a connection with almost no jitter, but that has visibly higher than 
> minimal latency, will show a failing grade. And if this is a jitter / packet 
> delay variation type test, I'm not sure about this situation. One could say it 
> is a very good connection but because it is 30ms higher than just one revealed 
> optimal ping, yet it might get a "D". Not sure how common this state of things 
> could be though.

this is why the grade should be based more on the ability to induce jitter (the 
additional latency under load) than the absolute number

a 100ms worth of buffer induced latency on a 20ms connection should score far 
worse than 20ms worth of induced latency on a 100ms connection.

David Lang

> Also since it is a global test a component of the grade is also internet
> backbone congestion, and not necessarily an ISP or equipment issue.
>
>
> On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 9:09 AM, Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 3:27 PM, Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 7:45 AM, Simon Barber <simon at superduper.net>
>> wrote:
>>>> The key figure for VoIP is maximum latency, or perhaps somewhere around
>> 99th
>>>> percentile. Voice packets cannot be played out if they are late, so how
>> late
>>>> they are is the only thing that matters. If many packets are early but
>> more
>>>> than a very small number are late, then the jitter buffer has to adjust
>> to
>>>> handle the late packets. Adjusting the jitter buffer disrupts the
>>>> conversation, so ideally adjustments are infrequent. When maximum
>> latency
>>>> suddenly increases it becomes necessary to increase the buffer fairly
>>>> quickly to avoid a dropout in the conversation. Buffer reductions can be
>>>> hidden by waiting for gaps in conversation. People get used to the
>> acoustic
>>>> round trip latency and learn how quickly to expect a reply from the
>> other
>>>> person (unless latency is really too high), but adjustments interfere
>> with
>>>> this learned expectation, so make it hard to interpret why the other
>> person
>>>> has paused. Thus adjustments to the buffering should be as infrequent as
>>>> possible.
>>>>
>>>> Codel measures and tracks minimum latency in its inner 'interval' loop.
>> For
>>>> VoIP the maximum is what counts. You can call it minimum + jitter, but
>> the
>>>> maximum is the important thing (not the absolute maximum, since a very
>> small
>>>> number of late packets are tolerable, but perhaps the 99th percentile).
>>>>
>>>> During a conversation it will take some time at the start to learn the
>>>> characteristics of the link, but ideally the jitter buffer algorithm
>> will
>>>> quickly get to a place where few adjustments are made. The more
>> conservative
>>>> the buffer (higher delay above minimum) the less likely a future
>> adjustment
>>>> will be needed, hence a tendency towards larger buffers (and more
>> delay).
>>>>
>>>> Priority queueing is perfect for VoIP, since it can keep the jitter at a
>>>> single hop down to the transmission time for a single maximum size
>> packet.
>>>> Fair Queueing will often achieve the same thing, since VoIP streams are
>>>> often the lowest bandwidth ongoing stream on the link.
>>>
>>> Unfortunately this is more nuanced than this. Not for the first time
>>> do I wish that email contained math, and/or we had put together a paper
>>> for this containing the relevant math. I do have a spreadsheet lying
>>> around here somewhere...
>>>
>>> In the case of a drop tail queue, jitter is a function of the total
>>> amount of data outstanding on the link by all the flows. A single
>>> big fat flow experiencing a drop will drop it's buffer occupancy
>>> (and thus effect on other flows) by a lot on the next RTT. However
>>> a lot of fat flows will drop by less if drops are few. Total delay
>>> is the sum of all packets outstanding on the link.
>>>
>>> In the case of stochastic packet-fair queuing jitter is a function
>>> of the total number of bytes in each packet outstanding on the sum
>>> of the total number of flows. The total delay is the sum of the
>>> bytes delivered per packet per flow.
>>>
>>> In the case of DRR, jitter is a function of the total number of bytes
>>> allowed by the quantum per flow outstanding on the link. The total
>>> delay experienced by the flow is a function of the amounts of
>>> bytes delivered with the number of flows.
>>>
>>> In the case of fq_codel, jitter is a function of of the total number
>>> of bytes allowed by the quantum per flow outstanding on the link,
>>> with the sparse optimization pushing flows with no queue
>>> queue in the available window to the front. Furthermore
>>> codel acts to shorten the lengths of the queues overall.
>>>
>>> fq_codel's delay: when the arriving in new flow packet can be serviced
>>> in less time than the total number of flows' quantums, is a function
>>> of the total number of flows that are not also building queues. When
>>> the total service time for all flows exceeds the interval the voip
>>> packet is delivered in, and AND the quantum under which the algorithm
>>> is delivering, fq_codel degrades to DRR behavior. (in other words,
>>> given enough queuing flows or enough new flows, you can steadily
>>> accrue delay on a voip flow under fq_codel). Predicting jitter is
>>> really hard to do here, but still pretty minimal compared to the
>>> alternatives above.
>>
>> And to complexify it further if the total flows' service time exceeds
>> the interval on which the voip flow is being delivered, the voip flow
>> can deliver a fq_codel quantum's worth of packets back to back.
>>
>> Boy I wish I could explain all this better, and/or observe the results
>> on real jitter buffers in real apps.
>>
>>>
>>> in the above 3 cases, hash collisions permute the result. Cake and
>>> fq_pie have a lot less collisions.
>>
>> Which is not necessarily a panacea either. perfect flow isolation
>> (cake) to hundreds of flows might be in some cases worse that
>> suffering hash collisions (fq_codel) for some workloads. sch_fq and
>> fq_pie have *perfect* flow isolation and I worry about the effects of
>> tons and tons of short flows (think ddos attacks) - I am comforted by
>> colliisions! and tend to think there is an ideal ratio of flows
>> allowed without queue management verses available bandwidth that we
>> don't know yet - as well as think for larger numbers of flows we
>> should be inheriting more global environmental (state of the link and
>> all queues) than we currently do in initializing both cake and
>> fq_codel queues.
>>
>> Recently I did some tests of 450+ flows (details on the cake mailing
>> list) against sch_fq which got hopelessly buried (10000 packets in
>> queue). cake and fq_pie did a lot better.
>>
>>> I am generally sanguine about this along the edge - from the internet
>>> packets cannot be easily classified, yet most edge networks have more
>>> bandwidth from that direction, thus able to fit WAY more flows in
>>> under 10ms, and outbound, from the home or small business, some
>>> classification can be effectively used in a X tier shaper (or cake) to
>>> ensure better priority (still with fair) queuing for this special
>>> class of application - not that under most home workloads that this is
>>> an issue. We think. We really need to do more benchmarking of web and
>>> dash traffic loads.
>>>
>>>> Simon
>>>>
>>>> Sent with AquaMail for Android
>>>> http://www.aqua-mail.com
>>>>
>>>> On May 7, 2015 6:16:00 AM jb <justin at dslr.net> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> I thought would be more sane too. I see mentioned online that PDV is a
>>>>> gaussian distribution (around mean) but it looks more like half a bell
>>>>> curve, with most numbers near the the lowest latency seen, and getting
>>>>> progressively worse with
>>>>> less frequency.
>>>>> At least for DSL connections on good ISPs that scenario seems more
>>>>> frequent.
>>>>> You "usually" get the best latency and "sometimes" get spikes or fuzz
>> on
>>>>> top of it.
>>>>>
>>>>> by the way after I posted I discovered Firefox has an issue with this
>> test
>>>>> so I had
>>>>> to block it with a message, my apologies if anyone wasted time trying
>> it
>>>>> with FF.
>>>>> Hopefully i can figure out why.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 9:44 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike at swm.pp.se>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Thu, 7 May 2015, jb wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> There is a web socket based jitter tester now. It is very early stage
>>>>>>> but
>>>>>>> works ok.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest?radar=1
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> So the latency displayed is the mean latency from a rolling 60 sample
>>>>>>> buffer, Minimum latency is also displayed. and the +/- PDV value is
>> the mean
>>>>>>> difference between sequential pings in that same rolling buffer. It
>> is quite
>>>>>>> similar to the std.dev actually (not shown).
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> So I think there are two schools here, either you take average and
>>>>>> display + / - from that, but I think I prefer to take the lowest of
>> the last
>>>>>> 100 samples (or something), and then display PDV from that "floor"
>> value, ie
>>>>>> PDV can't ever be negative, it can only be positive.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Apart from that, the above multi-place RTT test is really really nice,
>>>>>> thanks for doing this!
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Bloat mailing list
>>>>> Bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net
>>>>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/bloat
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Bloat mailing list
>>>> Bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net
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>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Dave Täht
>>> Open Networking needs **Open Source Hardware**
>>>
>>> https://plus.google.com/u/0/+EricRaymond/posts/JqxCe2pFr67
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Dave Täht
>> Open Networking needs **Open Source Hardware**
>>
>> https://plus.google.com/u/0/+EricRaymond/posts/JqxCe2pFr67
>>
>
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