[Starlink] UnderBloat on fiber and wisps

[Sebastian Moeller]

> On Mar 13, 2023, at 17:04, Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 8:08 AM Jeremy Austin via Rpm
> <rpm at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 3:02 AM Sebastian Moeller via Starlink <starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi Dan,
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On Jan 9, 2023, at 20:56, dan via Rpm <rpm at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> You don't need to generate the traffic on a link to measure how
>>>> much traffic a link can handle.
>>> 
>>>        [SM] OK, I will bite, how do you measure achievable throughput without actually generating it? Packet-pair techniques are notoriously imprecise and have funny failure modes.
>> 
>> 
>> I am also looking forward to the full answer to this question. While one can infer when a link is saturated by mapping network topology onto latency sampling, it can have on the order of 30% error, given that there are multiple causes of increased latency beyond proximal congestion.
>> 
>> A question I commonly ask network engineers or academics is "How can I accurately distinguish a constraint in supply from a reduction in demand?"
> 
> This is an insanely good point. In looking over the wisp
> configurations I have to date, many are using SFQ which has a default
> packet limit of 128 packets. Many are using SFQ with a *even shorter*
> packet limit, which looks good on speedtests which open many flows
> (keown's sqrt(flows) for bdp), but is *lousy* for allowing a single
> flow to achieve full rate (the more common case for end-user QoE).
> 
> I have in general tried to get mikrotik folk at least, to switch away
> from fifos, red, and sfq to wards fq_codel or cake at the defaults
> (good to 10Gbit) in part, due to this.
> 
> I think SFQ 128 really starts tapping out on most networks at around
> the 200Mbit level, and above 400, really, really does not have enough
> queue, so the net result is that wisps attempting to provide higher
> levels of service are not actually providing it in the real world, an
> accidental constraint in supply.
> 
> I have a blog piece, long in draft, called  "underbloat", talking to
> this. Also I have no seen multiple fiber installs that had had a
> reasonable 50ms FIFO buffer for 100Mbit, but when upgraded to 1gbit,
> left it at 5ms, which has bad sideffects for all traffic.
> 
> To me it looks also that at least some ubnt radios are FQd and underbuffered.

	This is why I tend to describe bufferbloat as a problem of over-sized and under-managed buffers hoping to imply that reducing the buffersize is not the only or even best remedy here. Once proberly managed large buffers do no harm (except wasting memory for most of the time, but since that buys some resilience that is not that bad).

Regards
	Sebastian

P.S.: This is a bit of a pendulum thing where one simplistic "solution" too-large-buffers gets replaced with another simplistic solution too-small-buffers ;)



> 
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> 
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> Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC