[Bloat] Terminology for Laypeople

[Matt Mathis]

I suggest moving further up the stack - any random Zoomer or gamer
understands that Application Lag is a bad thing.   Furthermore
statements of the form "Lag is most often caused by LUL or even BB"
are likely to be true without caveat.

Inverting the statement "BB causes LAG (or even LUL)" are less
generally true because the vast majority of queues in the internet are
drop tail, protected by adjacent managed queues (e.g. all of the
queues in switch fabrics within a chassi are protected my managed
queues at the input/output cards).    Statements of causality up the
stack are almost always vague and inaccurate or precise and too
complicated.

I agree with your colleague that since people don't understand micro
bursts, they assume links that are underloaded in the average are
unloaded.  (But note that this issue is an artifact of self clocked
protocols, and may change as more paced CC rolls out).

So my vote would be [Working] Application Lag, just to move a little
further up the stack.

Thanks,
--MM--
The best way to predict the future is to create it.  - Alan Kay

We must not tolerate intolerance;
       however our response must be carefully measured:
            too strong would be hypocritical and risks spiraling out of control;
            too weak risks being mistaken for tacit approval.

On Tue, May 4, 2021 at 5:02 PM Livingood, Jason via Bloat
<bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> Like many of you I have been immersed in buffer bloat discussions for many years, almost entirely within the technical community. Now that I am starting to explain latency & latency under load to internal non-technical folks, I have noticed some people don’t really understand “traditional” latency vs. latency under load (LUL).
>
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> As a result, I am planning to experiment in some upcoming briefings and call traditional latency “idle latency” – a measure of latency conducted on an otherwise idle connection. And then try calling LUL either “active latency” or perhaps “working latency” (suggested by an external colleague – can’t take credit for that one) – to try to communicate it is latency when the connection is experiencing normal usage.
>
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> Have any of you here faced similar challenges explaining this to non-technical audiences? Have you had any success with alternative terms? What do you think of these?
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> Thanks for any input,
>
> Jason
>
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