[Bloat] Terminology for Laypeople

[Dave Taht]

On Thu, May 6, 2021 at 6:41 AM David Lang <david at lang.hm> wrote:
>
> it's sometimesworth reminding technical folks that if you look at a small enough
> time slice, a network is either 0% or 100% utilized, so if the output is 100%
> utilized the instant a packet arrives, the device ither dropps the data or
> buffers it.

+1. Humans tend to think in terms of Mbit/sec, when a saner interval
to think about is bits/ms
or less. I tend to care about bits/20 ms as being the rightest number
for human perceptible latency.

At a ms level, well, we are so far from that. I'd put over here

http://flent-fremont.bufferbloat.net/~d/broadcom_aug9.pdf

What the "bandwidth" was for a typical web transaction with 50ms
latency nowadays.
It's zero.

The mental image I have of the latest home routers is of one of these:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howaboutthat/11164032/Jet-powered-VW-Beetle-that-goes-like-a-rocket.html

impacted into the side of a mountain.

>
> David Lang
>
>   On Thu, 6 May 2021, Jason Iannone wrote:
>
> > It's not a short discussion but I start with a comparison of circuit and
> > packet switching, usually with an accompanying drawing. There's a physicist
> > joke in here about assuming a frictionless environment but for the intent
> > of this explanation, a circuit switched path is bufferless because circuit
> > switched networks are point to point and bits are transmitted at the same
> > rate that they are received. Packet switching introduces a mechanism for
> > nodes supporting multiple ingress, single egress transmission. In order to
> > support transient bursts, network nodes hold onto bits for a time while the
> > egress interface processes the node's ingress traffic. That hold time
> > equates to additional latency. Every node in a path may subject a flow's
> > traffic to buffering, increasing latency in transit based on its individual
> > load.
> >
> > Jason
> >
> > On Tue, May 4, 2021 at 8:02 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).
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> 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.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> 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?
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Thanks for any input,
> >>
> >> Jason
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> >>
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Dave Täht CTO, TekLibre, LLC