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

Bob McMahon bob.mcmahon at broadcom.com
Thu Oct 20 15:04:37 EDT 2022


Intel has a good analogous video on this with their CPU video here
<https://youtu.be/o_WXTRS2qTY?t=316> going over branches and failed
predictions. And to Stuart's point, the longer pipelines make the forks
worse in the amount of in-process bytes that need to be thrown away.
Interactivity, in my opinion, suggests shrinking the pipeline because, with
networks, there is no quick way to throw away stale data rather every
forwarding device continues forward with invalid data. That's bad for the
network too, spending resources on something that's no longer valid. We in
the test & measurement community never measure this.

There have been a few requests that iperf 2 measure the "bytes thrown away"
per a fork (user moves a video pointer, etc.) I haven't come up with a good
test yet. I'm still trying to get basic awareness about existing latency,
OWD and responsiveness metrics. I do think measuring the amount of
resources spent on stale data is sorta like food waste, few really pay
attention to it.

Bob

FYI, iperf 2 supports TCP_NOTSENT_LOWAT for those interested.

--tcp-write-prefetch n[kmKM]
Set TCP_NOTSENT_LOWAT on the socket and use event based writes per select()
on the socket.


On Thu, Oct 20, 2022 at 11:32 AM Stuart Cheshire via Make-wifi-fast <
make-wifi-fast at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> On 20 Oct 2022, at 02:36, Sebastian Moeller <moeller0 at gmx.de> wrote:
>
> > Hi Stuart,
> >
> > [SM] That seems to be somewhat optimistic. We have been there before,
> short of mandating actually-working oracle schedulers on all end-points,
> intermediate hops will see queues some more and some less transient. So we
> can strive to minimize queue build-up sure, but can not avoid queues and
> long queues completely so we need methods to deal with them gracefully.
> > Also not many applications are actually helped all that much by letting
> information get stale in their own buffers as compared to an on-path queue.
> Think an on-line reaction-time gated game, the need is to distribute
> current world state to all participating clients ASAP.
>
> I’m afraid you are wrong about this. If an on-line game wants low delay,
> the only answer is for it to avoid generating position updates faster than
> the network carry them. One packet giving the current game player position
> is better than a backlog of ten previous stale ones waiting to go out.
> Sending packets faster than the network can carry them does not get them to
> the destination faster; it gets them there slower. The same applies to
> frames in a screen sharing application. Sending the current state of the
> screen *now* is better than having a backlog of ten previous stale frames
> sitting in buffers somewhere on their way to the destination. Stale data is
> not inevitable. Applications don’t need to have stale data if they avoid
> generating stale data in the first place.
>
> Please watch this video, which explains it better than I can in a written
> email:
>
> <https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2015/719/?time=892>
>
> Stuart Cheshire
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Make-wifi-fast at lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/make-wifi-fast

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