[Rpm] solved for "tens of thousands of people".

Dave Taht dave.taht at gmail.com
Thu Oct 28 19:34:20 EDT 2021


I wanted to offer a small correction to the current RPM abstract,
uploaded a few days ago:

https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-cpaasch-ippm-responsiveness-01.html

Millions. 3m at free alone had fq_codel on their DSL. comcast is..
however many docsis 3.1 modems have deployed (millions) ? eero and
everyone shipping qcom wifi chips is ? gfiber's deployment? the entire
3rd party firewall and router market (?) those are just the easier to
count numbers off the top of my head. Sure, in terms of postings and
individual interactions visible on the web in the latter case it
doesn't seem like a lot, but I figure the existing documentation and
user base is 1000x that....

so... millions.

If you want to also count in the upgrades in bandwidth in the last 10
years, another accomplishment, I think, was most of that bandwidth was
added without misguided increases in buffering, without our
fancy-schmancy algorithms needed, so that was many more millions. If
you want to think about server side, bbr, tsq, bql, packet pacing...
decreases.

So a small change in language perhaps?

"semi-solved for millions of people"?

Certainly wifi and lte suck the most of what's left to fix. I
generally say there's a billion routers left to upgrade.

One of the fantasy numbers that has kept me going for all these years
of living on top ramen was that if aqm and fq technologies I'd worked
on primarily... saved X users 1 second/day of waiting on the internet.
Say X is 10m today, that's 115 days/day and depending on how you want
to calculate that in terms of man years or time spent on the internet,
call it 400 man years per year. Not like any of us can go cash a check
on that karmic bank but, it's comforting.

(have a song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMG1wKpDT38 )

I tend to think that smashing latencies all through the stack affected
pretty much the whole internet's responsiveness - that and optimizing
web pages, cdns, etc, etc, also saved people a lot of time on waiting
on the internet. And along the way we made webrtc go from postage
stamp 2 frames per second in 2012 to all of civilization managing to
cope with working from home during covid. Imagine, covid-2012?

I've never come up with a number for annoying people less...

Blocking ads is still effective for saving time however, another
annoyance that's cropped up in the last few years is the teaser
paragraph and then
the demand to turn off advertising on a per site basis. I wish there
was a plugin for a browser that blocked content from paywall demanding
sites.
I'm glad I can pay google/pandora/netflix 10 bucks a month for
streaming services without ads.

Anyway, just the deployed aqm/fq solutions alone are in the 10s of
millions, IMHO. Just working so well for those using them that they
never noticed.

-- 
Fixing Starlink's Latencies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9gLo6Xrwgw

Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC


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