[Bloat] Questions for Bufferbloat Wikipedia article

Tue Apr 6 17:30:44 EDT 2021

Hi Roland,

thanks, much appreciated.

> On Apr 6, 2021, at 22:01, Bless, Roland (TM) <roland.bless at kit.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi Sebastian,
> 
> see comments at the end.
> 
> On 06.04.21 at 08:31 Sebastian Moeller wrote:
>> Hi Eric,
>> thanks for your thoughts.
>>> On Apr 6, 2021, at 02:47, Erik Auerswald <auerswal at unix-ag.uni-kl.de> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> On Mon, Apr 05, 2021 at 11:49:00PM +0200, Sebastian Moeller wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> all good questions, and interesting responses so far.
>>> 
>>> I'll add some details below, I mostly concur with your responses.
>>> 
>>>>> On Apr 5, 2021, at 14:46, Rich Brown <richb.hanover at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Dave Täht has put me up to revising the current Bufferbloat article
>>>>> on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat)
>>>>> [...]
>>>> [...] while too large buffers cause undesirable increase in latency
>>>> under load (but decent throughput), [...]
>>> 
>>> With too large buffers, even throughput degrades when TCP considers
>>> a delayed segment lost (or DNS gives up because the answers arrive
>>> too late).  I do think there is _too_ large for buffers, period.
>> 	Fair enough, timeouts could be changed though if required ;) but I fully concur that laergeish buffers require management to become useful ;)
>>> 
>>>> The solution basically is large buffers with adaptive management that
>>> 
>>> I would prefer the word "sufficient" instead of "large."
>> 	If properly managed there is no upper end for the size, it might not be used though, no?
>>> 
>>>> works hard to keep latency under load increase and throughput inside
>>>> an acceptable "corridor".
>>> 
>>> I concur that there is quite some usable range of buffer capacity when
>>> considering the latency/throughput trade-off, and AQM seems like a good
>>> solution to managing that.
>> 	I fear it is the only network side mitigation technique?
>>> 
>>> My preference is to sacrifice throughput for better latency, but then
>>> I have been bitten by too much latency quite often, but never by too
>>> little throughput caused by small buffers.  YMMV.
>> 	Yepp, with speedtests being the killer-application for fast end-user links (still, which is sad in itself), manufacturers and ISPs are incentivized to err on the side of too large for buffers, so the default buffering typically will not cause noticeable under-utilisation, as long as nobody wants to run single-flow speedtests over a geostationary satellite link ;). (I note that many/most speedtests silently default to test with multiple flows nowadays, with single stream tests being at least optional in some, which will reduce the expected buffering need).
>>> 
>>>> [...]
>>>> But e.g. for traditional TCPs the amount of expected buffer needs
>>>> increases with RTT of a flow
>>> 
>>> Does it?  Does the propagation delay provide automatic "buffering" in the
>>> network?  Does the receiver need to advertise sufficient buffer capacity
>>> (receive window) to allow the sender to fill the pipe?  Does the sender
>>> need to provide sufficient buffer capacity to retransmit lost segments?
>>> Where are buffers actually needed?
>> 	At all those places ;) in the extreme a single packet buffer should be sufficient, but that places unrealistic high demands on the processing capabilities at all nodes of a network and does not account for anything unexpected (like another low starting). And in all cases doing things smarter can help, like pacing is better at the sender's side (with better meaning easier in the network), competent AQM is better at the bottleneck link, and at the receiver something like TCP SACK (and the required buffers to make that work) can help; all those cases work better with buffers. The catch is that buffers solve important issues while introducing new issues, that need fixing. I am sure you know all this, but spelling it out helps me to clarify my thoughts on the matter, so please just ignore if boring/old news.
>>> 
>>> I am not convinced that large buffers in the network are needed for high
>>> throughput of high RTT TCP flows.
>>> 
>>> See, e.g., https://people.ucsc.edu/~warner/Bufs/buffer-requirements for
>>> some information and links to a few papers.
> 
> Thanks for the link Erik, but BBR is not properly described there
> "When the RTT creeps upward -- this taken as a signal of buffer occupancy congestion" and Sebastian also mentioned: "measures the induced latency increase from those, interpreting to much latency as sign that the capacity was reached/exceeded". BBR does not use
> delay or its gradient as congestion signal.

	Looking at https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3022184, I still think that it is not completely wrong to abstractly say BBR evaluates RTT changes as function of the current sending rate to probe the bottlenecks capacity (and adjust its sending rate based on that estimated capacity), but that might either indicate I am looking at the whole thing at too abstract a level, or, as I fear, that I am simply misunderstanding BBR's principle of operation... (or both ;)) (Sidenote I keep making: for a protocol believing it knows better than to interpret all packet losses as signs of congestion, it seems rather an ovrsight not having implemented a rfc3168 style CE response...)

> 
>> 	Thanks, I think the bandwidth delay product is still the worst case buffering required to allow 100% utilization with a single flow (a use case that at least for home links seems legit, for a back bone link probably not). But in any case if the buffers are properly managed their maximum size will not really matter, as long as it is larger than the required minimum ;)
> 
> Nope, a BDP-sized buffer is not required to allow 100% utilization with
> a single flow, because it depends on the used congestion control. For
> loss-based congestion control like Reno or Cubic, this may be true,
> but not necessarily for other congestion controls.

	Yes, I should have hedged that better. For protocols like the ubiquitous TCP CUBIC (seems to be used by most major operating systems nowadays) a single flow might need BDP buffering to get close to 100% utilization. I am not wanting to say cubic is more important than other protocols, but it still represents a significant share of internet traffic. And any scheme to counter bufferbloat, could do worse than accept that reality and to allow for sufficient buffering to allow such protocols acceptable levels of utilization (all the while keeping the latency under load increase under control).

Best Regards
	Sebastian

> 
> Regards,
> Roland