[Bloat] Steam's TCP analysis

[Benjamin Cronce]

Now that I think of it, since TCP wants a minimum of two un-acked packets,
you can just reduce the rate of your ACKs to keep the sender from flooding.
Total hack of course. It's really a packet-pacing issue.

On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 6:11 PM, Benjamin Cronce <bcronce at gmail.com> wrote:

> In the past I've seen issues with Windows Updates because the CDN was 1 ms
> away. TCP wants to have 2 segments in flight, resulting in a non-responsive
> TCP stream below 13Mb/s. CDNs with low RTTs cause cause issues with low
> bandwidth connections. Not only does DSL tend to have a low first hop
> latency, it also tends to have less bandwidth than cable, making it a prime
> victim for on-site CDNs.
>
> I just attempted to install a game(about 1GiB) from Steam and it quickly
> made about 20 connections to my ISP's on-site CDN. Even if you assume a
> 10ms ping for someone with DSL, that's a minimum of about 1.3Mb/s per TCP
> steam. Below that, TCP becomes unresponsive to congestion. 20 connections
> times 1.3Mb/s is 26Mb/s of packet flooding power.
>
> On Jan 27, 2017 10:15 AM, "Dave Taht" <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> All over the net I hear of the bloated horrors steam and windows 10
>> updates are inflicting on people, and several saying that inbound
>> shaping isn't helping. I finally got two captures of a steam download
>> here:
>>
>> https://github.com/tohojo/sqm-scripts/issues/43#issuecomment-275281826
>>
>> And aside from some potential oddities (window, timestamp) didn't see
>> anything terribly odd in the first trace I got there. Could someone
>> take a look with smarter eyeballs than I have?
>>
>> --
>> Dave Täht
>> Let's go make home routers and wifi faster! With better software!
>> http://blog.cerowrt.org
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net
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>>
>
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