[Bloat] [Make-wifi-fast] The most wonderful video ever about bufferbloat

[Stuart Cheshire]

On 9 Oct 2022, at 06:14, Dave Taht via Make-wifi-fast <make-wifi-fast at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> This was so massively well done, I cried. Does anyone know how to get in touch with the ifxit folk?
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UICh3ScfNWI

I’m surprised that you liked this video. It seems to me that it repeats all the standard misinformation. The analogy they use is the standard terrible example of waiting in a long line at a grocery store, and the “solution” is letting certain traffic “jump the line, angering everyone behind them”.

Some quotes from the video:

> it would be so much more efficient for them to let you skip the line and just check out, especially since you’re in a hurry, but they’re rudely refusing

> to go back to our grocery store analogy this would be like if a worker saw you standing at the back ... and either let you skip to the front of the line or opens up an express lane just for you

The video describes the problem of bufferbloat, and then describes the same failed solution that hasn’t worked for the last three decades. Describing the obvious simple-minded (wrong) solution that any normal person would think of based on their personal human experience waiting in grocery stores and airports, is not describing the solution to bufferbloat. The solution to bufferbloat is not that if you are privileged then you get to “skip to the front of the line”. The solution to bufferbloat is that there is no line!

With grocery stores and airports people’s arrivals are independent and not controlled. There is no way for a grocery store or airport to generate backpressure to tell people to wait at home when a queue begins to form. The key to solving bufferbloat is generating timely backpressure to prevent the queue forming in the first place, not accepting a huge queue and then deciding who deserves special treatment to get better service than all the other peons who still have to wait in a long queue, just like before.

Stuart Cheshire