[Cerowrt-devel] SQM Question #5: Link Layer Adaptation Overheads

Tue Jan 7 03:34:52 PST 2014

Hi David,

On Jan 7, 2014, at 12:08 , David Personette <dperson at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm in the US, but live in a relatively rural area. My only internet options are DSL and satellite. The local provider is Century Link (it used to be Sprint, but they sold their copper phone business off). I have the fastest service that they offer (based on distance from the DSLAM), 4 down / .5 up.

	And you are not alone, a considerable percentage of the population wherever you look is hanging on such connections. So cerowrt should really help those folk as well as luckier ones.

> 
> I have had SmokePing monitoring my latency to the first hop outside my network for over a year now (I've been on CeroWRT the whole time). My baseline (no load) latency is 31ms. I used to have AQM throttling back to 80% of my already pathetic bandwidth. I would still regularly see periods lasting minutes to hours when latency would be 80 - 120ms.
> 
> I only recently grokked what you were talking about with tc_stab since I got back from the holidays with the family, I set things up as you suggested for Fred (nfq_codel, "target 25ms" in advanced egress, ATM, per packet overhead 40,

	The exact number depends on the encapsulation your ISP uses, 40 is right for a typical PPPoE over LLC/SNAP connection, if that is correct for your link you are fine, otherwise contact me if you want to empirically find out the proper value for your link.

> and set my SQM bandwidth limits to 95%). Since the 30th my "worst case" latency has been 41ms.

	the fq_codels really are great if in control of the bottleneck, really good work by bright people! 

> Plus I get to use more of my actual bandwidth.

	Well, that I am not so sure. By enabling link layer ATM the router will automatically take care of the ATM cell overhead for you (basically reducing the effective rate to ~90% of the link, in other words you get the same effect by shaping to 90%). It will also handle the per packet overhead and the nasty potential padding of the last ATM cell (both have a stronger effect on small packets and are hard to actually account for by static rate reduction; link layer ATM comes again to the rescue by taking these two into account individually for each packet based on the packet size). So effectively 95% with link layer adjustments might mean a lower wire rate than 80% without; the important thing is that with the link layer adjustments the link capacity is estimated correctly avoiding the modem's and the DSLAM's buffers to fill and cause buffer bloat.

> I REALLY wish that I'd made the time to read your emails about setting up the ATM overhead earlier.

	Oh, I can understand, when I learned about this some years ago (by stumbling over Russel Stuart's website and Jesper Brouer's thesis) it immediate changed my internet experience (I was on a 3 down / 0.5 up connection at that time). :)

Best Regards
	Sebastian

> 
> Thank you.
> 
> -- 
> David P.
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 9:27 AM, Sebastian Moeller <moeller0 at gmx.de> wrote:
> Hi Fred,
> 
> 
> On Jan 6, 2014, at 15:22 , Fred Stratton <fredstratton at imap.cc> wrote:
> 
> > The line rate is 11744/1022 kb/s, but changes moment to moment. SNR is 12.1 decibel.  I am using 11000/950 kb/s as settings.
> 
>         So 100 * 11000 / 11744 = 93.66% of downlink line rate and 100* 950 / 1022 = 92.95 % of uplink line rate; quite impressive given the common wisdom of 85% :).
> 
> 
> >  I shall try your suggestion when there is something worth watching live, to provide a valid comparison, which may not be before 21:30 CET on Sunday.
> 
>         Oh, take your time, this is really not essential, butit would be a nice data point for figuring out how important the correct overhead estimate really is in real life, theory being theory and all…
> 
> Best Regards
>         Sebastian
> 
> >
> > On 06/01/14 14:12, Sebastian Moeller wrote:
> >> Hi Fred,
> >>
> >>
> >> On Jan 6, 2014, at 10:52 , Fred Stratton <fredstratton at imap.cc> wrote:
> >>
> >>> I have been operating the latest build with 6relayd disabled. The henet /48 I have been allocated is subnetted correctly, presumably by dnsmasq.
> >>>
> >>> I adopted the suggestions to use nfq_codel and an egress target of 25ms , with an overhead of 40 on a PPPoE connection.  I chose to watch the first 2 episodes of the 3 part third series of 'Sherlock', live on iPlayer, and these streamed correctly and uninterrupted for 90 minutes.  This was not previously possible.  (Quite whether they were up to the standard of previous episodes is another matter.)
> >>>
> >>> I can watch iPlayer with little stutter whilst downloading Arch Linux by torrent, downloading other files at the same time.
> >>>
> >>> So, for a relatively slow ADSL2+ line, the current build works well.
> >>      Out of curiosity, to what percentage of the "current line rate" (you know the one reported by your modem) you shaped up- and downlink? And in case you have too much time on your hand, how does the same feel with an overhead of 10 (to see how bad an overhead underestimate would feel for a user), since you currently happen to have a quite sensitive subjective latency evaluation system set up :)…
> >>
> >> Best Regards
> >>      Sebastian
> >>
> >>>
> >>> On 06/01/14 03:29, Dave Taht wrote:
> >>>> On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 10:40 AM, Fred Stratton <fredstratton at imap.cc> wrote:
> >>>>> Link Names:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> For consistency, if ADSL is used as a portmanteau term, them VDSL should be
> >>>>> used as the equivalent for VDSL and VDSL2.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> CeroWRT has to decide whether it is an experimental build, or something that
> >>>>> will eventually be used in production, so these decisions can be made
> >>>>> consistently.
> >>>> Well, what I was aiming for was for us to get the sqm scripts and gui
> >>>> up to where they were better than the standard openwrt qos scripts and
> >>>> then push them up to openwrt to where they could be more widely
> >>>> deployed.
> >>>>
> >>>> Aside from being able to dynamically assign priorities in the gui, we
> >>>> are there.  Except that nfq_codel is currently getting better results
> >>>> than fq_codel at low bandwidths, and I'm tempted to pour all of
> >>>> simple.qos into C.
> >>>>
> >>>> As for cero's future - certainly since all the snowden revelations
> >>>> I've been going around saying that "friends don't let friends run
> >>>> factory firmware". I would like a stable build of sqm and cerowrt to
> >>>> emerge, and to then go off and work on improving wifi. Regrettably
> >>>> what seems to be happening is more backwards than forwards on the
> >>>> former, and ramping up on the ath9k and ath10k is taking more time
> >>>> than I'd like, and it seems likely I'll be working on those primarily
> >>>> on another platform and only eventually pushing the results out to
> >>>> cero, mainline kernel
> >>>>
> >>>> So it's still at the "keep plugging away" point for sqm, ipv6, cero in
> >>>> general, with the stable release always just out of sight.
> >>>>
> >>>> Tackling the ipv6 problem is next on my agenda on cero, and getting a
> >>>> test suite going is next on my day job.
> >>>>
> >>>>> I concur with your ADSL setup suggestion as default. I have been running the
> >>>>> Sebastian Moeller ping script overnight to calculate ADSL overhead for the
> >>>>> last several days. After several hours of curve fitting using Octave, an
> >>>>> overhead result is displayed. This novel approach works well.
> >>>> It would be nice to get to where we could autoconfigure a router using
> >>>> tools like these with no human intervention. This includes bandwidth
> >>>> estimation.
> >>>>
> >>>>> The overhead for the particular setup I use was 40 for PPPoE, and 10 for
> >>>>> PPPoA.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> The default you suggest is a suitable starting point, I suggest.
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> On 04/01/14 18:16, Rich Brown wrote:
> >>>>>> QUESTION #5: I still don’t have any great answers for the Link Layer
> >>>>>> Adaptation overhead descriptions and recommendations. In an earlier message,
> >>>>>> (see
> >>>>>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/pipermail/cerowrt-devel/2013-December/001914.html
> >>>>>> and following messages), Fred Stratton described the overheads carried by
> >>>>>> various options, and Sebastian Moeller also gave some useful advice.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> After looking at the options, I despair of giving people a clear
> >>>>>> recommendation that would be optimal for their equipment. Consequently, I
> >>>>>> believe the best we can do is come up with “good enough” recommendations
> >>>>>> that are not wrong, and still give decent performance.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> In this spirit, I have changed Draft #3 of the “Setting up SQM” page to
> >>>>>> reflect this understanding. See
> >>>>>> http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/cerowrt/wiki/Setting_up_AQM_for_CeroWrt_310
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>         ADSL/ATM link: Choose “ADSL/ATM", and set Per Packet Overhead to
> >>>>>> 40
> >>>>>>         VDSL2 link: Choose “VDSL”, and set Per Packet Overhead to 8
> >>>>>>         Other kind of link (e.g., Cable, Fiber, Ethernet, other not
> >>>>>> listed): Choose “None (default)”, and set Per Packet Overhead to 0
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> NB: I have changed the first menu choice to “ADSL/ATM” and the second to
> >>>>>> “VDSL” in the description. I would ask that we change to GUI to reflect
> >>>>>> those names as well. This makes it far easier/less confusing to talk about
> >>>>>> the options.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> As always, I welcome help in setting out clear recommendations that work
> >>>>>> well for the vast majority of people who try CeroWrt. Thanks.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Rich
> >>>>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>>>> Cerowrt-devel mailing list
> >>>>>> Cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
> >>>>>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
> >>>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>>> Cerowrt-devel mailing list
> >>>>> Cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
> >>>>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
> >>>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> Cerowrt-devel mailing list
> >>> Cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
> >>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
> >
> 
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