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

[David Lang]

On Sat, 26 Jul 2014, David Lang wrote:

> On Sat, 26 Jul 2014, Sebastian Moeller wrote:
>
>> On Jul 26, 2014, at 22:39 , David Lang <david at lang.hm> wrote:
>> 
>>> by how much tuning is required, I wasn't meaning how frequently to tune, 
>>> but how close default settings can come to the performance of a expertly 
>>> tuned setup.
>>
>> 	Good question.
>> 
>>> 
>>> Ideally the tuning takes into account the characteristics of the hardware 
>>> of the link layer. If it's IP encapsulated in something else (ATM, PPPoE, 
>>> VPN, VLAN tagging, ethernet with jumbo packet support for example), then 
>>> you have overhead from the encapsulation that you would ideally take into 
>>> account when tuning things.
>>> 
>>> the question I'm talking about below is how much do you loose compared to 
>>> the idea if you ignore this sort of thing and just assume that the wire is 
>>> dumb and puts the bits on them as you send them? By dumb I mean don't even 
>>> allow for inter-packet gaps, don't measure the bandwidth, don't try to 
>>> pace inbound connections by the timing of your acks, etc. Just run BQL and 
>>> fq_codel and start the BQL sizes based on the wire speed of your link 
>>> (Gig-E on the 3800) and shrink them based on long-term passive observation 
>>> of the sender.
>>
>> 	As data talks I just did a quick experiment with my ADSL2+ koine at 
>> home. The solid lines in the attached plot show the results for proper 
>> shaping with SQM (shaping to 95% of del link rates of downstream and 
>> upstream while taking the link layer properties, that is ATM encapsulation 
>> and per packet overhead into account) the broken lines show the same system 
>> with just the link layer adjustments and per packet overhead adjustments 
>> disabled, but still shaping to 95% of link rate (this is roughly equivalent 
>> to 15% underestimation of the packet size). The actual theist is 
>> netperf-wrappers RRUL (4 tcp streams up, 4 tcp steams down while measuring 
>> latency with ping and UDP probes). As you can see from the plot just 
>> getting the link layer encapsulation wrong destroys latency under load 
>> badly. The host is ~52ms RTT away, and with fq_codel the ping time per leg 
>> is just increased one codel target of 5ms each resulting in an modest 
>> latency increase of ~10ms with proper shaping for a total of ~65ms, with 
>> improper shaping RTTs increase to ~95ms (they almost double), so RTT 
>> increases by ~43ms. Also note how the extremes for the broken lines are 
>> much worse than for the solid lines. In short I would estimate that a 
>> slight misjudgment (15%) results in almost 80% increase of latency under 
>> load. In other words getting the rates right matters a lot. (I should also 
>> note that in my setup there is a secondary router that limits RTT to max 
>> 300ms, otherwise the broken lines might look even worse...)

is this with BQL/fq_codel in both directions or only in one direction?

David Lang

> what is the latency like without BQL and codel? the pre-bufferbloat version? 
> (without any traffic shaping)
>
> I agree that going from 65ms to 95ms seems significant, but if the stock 
> version goes into up above 1000ms, then I think we are talking about things 
> that are 'close'
>
> assuming that latency under load without the improvents got >1000ms
>
> fast-slow (in ms)
> ideal=10
> untuned=43
> bloated > 1000
>
> fast/slow
> ideal = 1.25
> untuned = 1.83
> bloated > 19
>
> slow/fast
> ideal = 0.8
> untuned = 0.55
> bloated = 0.05
>
> rather than looking at how much worse it is than the ideal, look at how much 
> closer it is to the ideal than to the bloated version.
>
> David Lang
>
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