[Bloat] Invisibility of bufferbloat and its remedies

[Dave Taht]

I will be in D.C., presenting https://www.cs.kau.se/tohojo/cake/ - next week.

If there are people to see, asses to kick or kiss, I'm up for it, let
me know. Presently I just plan to give my talk and get the heck out of
dodge.

One of cake's "minor" features is the *perfect* defeat of the htb
based shaper in cable modems. If you know the set-rate on the modem,
you
just set it to the same thing and get vastly superior performance to
docsis 3.1, pie, or the sqm-scripts.

On Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 3:43 PM, dpreed at deepplum.com
<dpreed at deepplum.com> wrote:
> I have been one of the most prominent advocates of network neutrality. I'm
> constantly informing my friends and the press about "buffering" not being
> related to neutrality at all.
>
>
>
> I think that's the best we can do.
>
>
>
> Packet neutrality is actually a key part of the Internet's design, pushing
> control mechanisms to the edge, with a minimum of "intelligence" in the
> routers/switches/gateways. In particular, "content-based" and
> "endpoint-address-based" targeted throttling was never how the Internet
> Protocol layer was supposed to work. That's a fundamental result of the
> "end-to-end argument" applied to congestion management. I've spent a lot of
> time on that issue technically. The original discussions going back before
> Van Jacobson's early work, up to RED and ECN, all are based on providing
> congestion signalling sufficient to cause endpoints competing for resources
> to adapt their behavior cooperatively in real time, while maintaining
> minimal latency under load.
>
>
>
> Latency under load is the crucial metric across the entire IP layer,
> endpoints and routers. It's clear that minimizing latency under load has to
> be achieved by avoiding buffering insite the network, moving it to the
> source (and destination).
>
>
>
> I've given this lecture to policy people a lot. In fact, deliberate creation
> of "bloat" is a technical strategy that has been used in the past to destroy
> VoIP and other real-time communicaitons. Microsoft was caught doing it
> decades ago, as were some other conflicted communicaitons providers. They
> could selectively delay small packets using DPI, while letting FTPs get full
> speed. That's one of the reasons we coined the idea of Network Neutrality.
>
>
>
> But radical right wingers of the sort that blossom in the paranoid world of
> the dark net started arguing that the routers should have political freedom
> to do whatever they damn well pleased with packets, because routers are
> people just like corporations, and a "free market" is the solution to
> everything.
>
>
>
> Well, technically, the Internet doesn't work if their is not some mechanism
> for eliminiating lag under load by eliminating queueing delay in bottleneck
> nodes.
>
>
>
> That's ultimately what Network Neutrality is about.  There's a lot of other
> crap being pushed by folks who pile on to the Network Neutrality discussion.
> People want to "fix prices" for example, arguing that profits are bad. Those
> guys are not the problem.
>
>
>
> The problem is that the vertically integrated monopolists want to claim that
> the Internet should be subject to Deep Packet Inspection at every router,
> designed to charge rents based on content of the packets and who is the
> original sender or destination of the packet - that is, charging Netflix or
> NBC Universal packets nothing, and charging IPFS packets 100x as much.
>
>
>
> So, no, the Network Neutrality people are NOT the problem with Bufferbloat.
>
>
>
> Comcast, on the other hand, has been slow-rolling DOCSIS 3.0, because their
> customers on DOCSIS 2.0 are just ordering faster service tiers to overcome
> the Bufferbloat in their DOCSIS 2 CMTS's.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: "Dave Taht" <dave.taht at gmail.com>
> Sent: Monday, June 18, 2018 3:07pm
> To: "dpreed at deepplum.com" <dpreed at deepplum.com>
> Cc: cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net, "bloat"
> <bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net>
> Subject: Re: Invisibility of bufferbloat and its remedies
>
> On Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 9:26 AM, dpreed at deepplum.com
> <dpreed at deepplum.com> wrote:
>> https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/3-easy-tips-to-fix-constant-buffering/
>>
>> It's distressing how little the tech press understands the real problem.
>
> Yea, that one is pretty sad.
>
> It still remains a field of active academic research:
>
> https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2018&q=bufferbloat&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5
>
>>
>> Of course, cable companies like Charter and ATT who have mostly DOCSIS 2
>> gear deployed can't admit to their plant being bloat-causing.
>>
>> In fact it protects their cable business against cord cutters.
>
> Lacking competition in general, doesn't help.
>
> What I am actually more frustrated about is the network neutrality
> advocates A) conflating "buffering" with malfeasance, rather than a
> technical problem
> and B) Using politics rather than technology to attempt to achieve
> their goals. If *only* a few prominent members of that side of affairs
> "got" that some better technology, deployed, might solve some of their
> problems and make the internet better for everyone, we'd make more
> progress.
>
> fq_codel is a uniquely "american" algorithm, in that it gives the
> "little guy" a little boost until it achieves parity with everyone
> else.
>
>>
>> And the solution is needed in the CMTS once neighbors all start becoming
>> heavier users, because it is a shared buffering pool with no fairness or
>> bloat protection.
>
> My principle observation is that with the changes in traffic patterns
> in the last decade, and the predominance of application-rate limited
> streaming, that most
> folk are merely forced into a bandwidth tier that is less rarely
> annoying. This does not of course solve the corporate gateway problems
> very well, nor does it truly kill it dead, but until that day when
> "the right stuff" is readily available, and more informed demand
> exists.
>
> I was sad to see recently a cisco white paper that even ignored their
> own work on pie.
>
>> Still, routers with queue management that reduce bloat would help a lot,
>> if "buffering" is seen frequently under load.
>>
>> So why isn't anyone talking about this problem after at least a decade of
>> knowing it, and knowing how to fix it?
>>
>> I blame IETF members, individually and collectively. If ietf exists for
>> any reason other than as a boondoggle for world travel, it's for resolving
>> issues like this one.
>
> Heh. I have essentially abandoned the IETF as the inmates are running
> the asylum, and trying to continue to make our points there was
> seemingly fruitless
> - and out of my budget. I'd rather stay home and get better code out
> the door. Or come up with some other set of orgs to annoy into paying
> attention.
>
> I would not mind going to another IETF meeting to give a preso (on,
> say, cake), but I'm unwilling to front the funds or time anymore.
>
>
>>
>
>
>
> --
>
> Dave Täht
> CEO, TekLibre, LLC
> http://www.teklibre.com
> Tel: 1-669-226-2619



-- 

Dave Täht
CEO, TekLibre, LLC
http://www.teklibre.com
Tel: 1-669-226-2619