[Cerowrt-devel] Ideas on how to simplify and popularize bufferbloat control for consideration.

[Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu]

On Sat, 24 May 2014 10:02:53 -0400, "R." said:

> Further, this function could be auto-scheduled or made enabled on
> router boot up.

Yeah, if such a thing worked, it would be good.

(Note in the following that a big part of my *JOB* is doing "What could
possibly go wrong?" analysis on mission-critical systems, which tends to color
my viewpoint on projects. I still think the basic concept is good, just
difficult to do, and am listing the obvious challenges for anybody brave
enough to tackle it... :)

> I must be missing something important which prevents this. What is it?

There's a few biggies.  The first is what the linux-kernel calls -ENOPATCH -
nobody's written the code.  The second is you need an upstream target someplace
to test against.  You need to deal with both the "server is unavalailable due
to a backhoe incident 2 time zones away" problem (which isn't *that* hard, just
default to Something Not Obviously Bad(TM), and "server is slashdotted" (whci
is a bit harder to deal with.  Remember that there's some really odd corner
cases to worry about - for instance, if there's a power failure in a town, then
when the electric company restores power you're going to have every cerowrt box
hit the server within a few seconds - all over the same uplink most likely.  No
good data can result from that... (Holy crap, it's been almost 3 decades since
I first saw a Sun 3/280 server tank because 12 Sun 3/50s all rebooted over the
network at once when building power was restored).

And if you're in Izbekistan and the closest server netwise is at 60 Hudson, the
analysis to compute the correct values becomes.... interesting.

Dealing with non-obvious error conditions is also a challenge - a router
may only boot once every few months.  And if you happen to be booting just
as a BGP routing flap is causing your traffic to take a vastly suboptimal
path, you may end up encoding a vastly inaccurate setting and have it stuck
there, causing suckage for non-obvious reasons for the non-technical, so you
really don't want to enable auto-tuning unless you also have a good plan for
auto-*RE*tuning....



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