[Bloat] Rigorous Coffee Shop Bloat Testing

[Stephen Hemminger]

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

> On Tue, Sep 3, 2019 at 8:57 AM Rich Brown <richb.hanover at gmail.com> wrote:
> >  
> > > On Sep 3, 2019, at 11:22 AM, bloat-request at 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"