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

[Dave Taht]

On Mon, Oct 17, 2022 at 5:02 PM Stuart Cheshire <cheshire at apple.com> wrote:
>
> 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”.

Accuracy be damned. The analogy to common experience resonates more.

>
> 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

I think the person with the cheetos pulling out a gun and shooting
everyone in front of him (AQM) would not go down well.

> > 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

Actually that analogy is fairly close to fair queuing. The multiple
checker analogy is one of the most common analogies in queue theory
itself.

>
> The video describes the problem of bufferbloat, and then describes the same failed solution that hasn’t worked for the last three decades.

Hmm? It establishes the scenario, explains the problem *quickly*,
disses gamer routers for not getting it right..  *points to an
accurate test*, and then to the ideas and products that *actually
work* with "smart queueing", with a screenshot of the most common
(eero's optimize for gaming and videoconferencing), and fq_codel and
cake *by name*, and points folk at the best known solution available,
openwrt.

Bing, baddabang, boom. Also the comments were revealing. A goodly
percentage already knew the problem, more than a few were inspired to
take the test,
there was a whole bunch of "Aha!" success stories and 360k views,
which is more people than we've ever been able to reach in for
example, a nanog conference.

I loved that folk taking the test actually had quite a few A results,
without having had to do anything. At least some ISPs are getting it
more right now!

At this point I think gamers in particular know what "brands" we've
tried to establish - "Smart queues", "SQM", "OpenWrt", fq_codel and
now "cake" are "good" things to have, and are stimulating demand by
asking for them,   It's certainly working out better and better for
evenroute, firewalla, ubnt and others, and I saw an uptick in
questions about this on various user forums.

I even like that there's a backlash now of people saying "fixing
bufferbloat doesn't solve everything" -

>  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!

I like the idea of a guru floating above a grocery cart with a better
string of explanations, explaining

   - "no, grasshopper, the solution to bufferbloat is no line... at all".

>
> 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.

I am not huge on the word "backpressure" here. Needs to signal the
other side to slow down, is more accurate. So might say timely
signalling rather than timely backpressure?

Other feedback I got  was that the video was too smarmy (I agree),
different audiences than gamers need different forms of outreach...

but to me, winning the gamers has always been one of the most
important things, as they make a lot of buying decisions, and they
benefit the most for
fq and packet prioritization as we do today in gamer routers and in
cake + qosify.

maybe that gets in the way of more serious markets. Certainly I would
like another video explaining what goes wrong with videoconferencing.






>
> Stuart Cheshire
>


-- 
This song goes out to all the folk that thought Stadia would work:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dtaht_the-mushroom-song-activity-6981366665607352320-FXtz
Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC