[Bloat] Questions for Bufferbloat Wikipedia article - question #2

David Lang david at lang.hm
Mon Apr 5 14:08:07 EDT 2021


On Mon, 5 Apr 2021, Rich Brown wrote:

> Next question...
>
>> 2) All network equipment can be bloated. I have seen (but not really followed) controversy regarding the amount of buffering needed in the Data Center. Is it worth having the Wikipedia article distinguish between Data Center equipment and CPE/home/last mile equipment? Similarly, is the "bloat condition" and its mitigation qualitatively different between those applications? Finally, do any of us know how frequently data centers/backbone ISPs experience buffer-induced latencies? What's the magnitude of the impact?

the bandwidth available in datacenters is high enough that it's much harder to 
run into grief there (recognizing that not every piece of datacenter equipment 
is hooked to 100G circuits)

I think it's best to talk about excessive buffers in terms of time rather than 
bytes, and you can then show the difference between two buffers of the same 
size, one connected to a 10Mb (or 1Mb) DSL upload vs 100G datacenter circuit. 
After that one example, the rest of the article can talk about time and it will 
be globally applicable.

David Lang


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