[NNagain] I keep hoping that we will turn this corner

[Dave Crocker]

On 6/1/2024 7:48 AM, Dave Taht via Nnagain wrote:
> https://randomneuronsfiring.com/all-the-reasons-that-bufferbloat-isnt-a-problem/
>
A curse of being bright is failing to recognize when we aren't. If only 
there were a term for that...

Some decades back, I heard Kleinrock give a summary of queuing theory 
research where he reduced it to a graph.  Throughput vs. latency.  The 
curve was almost flat, rising only slightly, until the knee of the 
curve, which was quite sharp, going to almost vertical.  He noted that 
the math for this was complicated but the summary description was not:  
"Things are very, very good, until they are very very bad. When they are 
good, you don't need queuing.  When they are bad, queuing won't help; 
you need more capacity.  Queuing is for the brief and occasional period 
within the knee of the curve."

If it ain't transient then queuing isn't the answer.  If it is 
transient, you don't need lots of buffering.

Systems thinking is not natural for most of us, and bufferbloat is an 
example of local optimization without attention to systems effects.  For 
the list of push-backs your article cites, that lack of attention is due 
to excessive faith in entirely misguided intuitions.

Systems thinking requires quite a bit of skepticism about intuitions.


d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
mast:@dcrocker at mastodon.social