[Starlink] Widely different bufferbloat on two machines connected to one access point

[Starlink] Widely different bufferbloat on two machines connected to one access point

[Doc Searls]

A question for the true geniuses here, before I call an Apple one who isn't...

We have two laptops here, both feet away from the nearest Eero hot spot in a household network fed by a cable modem, an Aris DOCSIS 3.1 router and a 24-port Netgear switch.

My laptop is a 6-year old MacBook Pro. My wife's laptop is a brand new MacBook Air that rocks in every respect but its network connection,

Using Fast.com, I'm getting 450 Mbps down, 38 Mbps up, with 14 ms of unloaded latency and 28 ms of loaded latency. My wife is getting 67 Mbps down, 28 Mbps up, 15 ms of unloaded latency and 780 ms of loaded latency. 

Repeated tests yield similar results.

In other words, her machine is getting a lot of bufferbloat and mine is not.

If I connect by Ethernet direct to the switch through a USB-C to Ethernet adapter, I get 880 Mbps down, with other values about the same. Using the same Ethernet connection, she gets roughly the same results as she gets on WiFi.

So it seems the problem is with her new machine. If so, what's the fix?

We do have an immediate need: downloading seven years of emails via IMAP from her server at Rackspace, which we are leaving because the company failed spectacularly in a ransomware attack and is unworthy of customer faith. It has taken most of a week so far to download 390,000 emails, and we would like to speed that up.

I'm less lucky, since my mail (unlike hers) was on the Rackspace Exchange server, which was the target of the attack. I have been unable to retrieve anything so far, and I am losing hope that I ever will.

Anyway, the question is about radically different bufferbloat on two machines connected the same way—and what to do about it.

Thanks,

Doc

Re: [Starlink] Widely different bufferbloat on two machines connected to one access point

[Dave Taht]

This is kind of OT for here, but I'll bite:

On Tue, Jan 17, 2023 at 8:27 AM Doc Searls via Starlink
<starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> A question for the true geniuses here, before I call an Apple one who isn't...
>
> We have two laptops here, both feet away from the nearest Eero hot spot in a household network fed by a cable modem, an Aris DOCSIS 3.1 router and a 24-port Netgear switch.

Eero 5? or 6?

>
> My laptop is a 6-year old MacBook Pro. My wife's laptop is a brand new MacBook Air that rocks in every respect but its network connection,
>
> Using Fast.com, I'm getting 450 Mbps down, 38 Mbps up, with 14 ms of unloaded latency and 28 ms of loaded latency. My wife is getting 67 Mbps down, 28 Mbps up, 15 ms of unloaded latency and 780 ms of loaded latency.

Ouch.

> Repeated tests yield similar results.

The openwrt world at least, and elsewhere, is rife with reports that
apple's wifi6 support is not working well with many aps (or vice
versa).

>
> In other words, her machine is getting a lot of bufferbloat and mine is not.

All the packets are accruing the AP in this case, and the eero 6 is in
general way more bufferbloated than the 5 was.

> If I connect by Ethernet direct to the switch through a USB-C to Ethernet adapter, I get 880 Mbps down, with other values about the same. Using the same Ethernet connection, she gets roughly the same results as she gets on WiFi.

However, that is odd.

>
> So it seems the problem is with her new machine. If so, what's the fix?

I use mbsync to pull down my IMAP stuff.

https://isync.sourceforge.io/mbsync.html

As how to get that *back* into the format an apple email client can
use, not sure,
I'd try to suck down a small imap db from somewhere, and then try to
read it with your client.

>
> We do have an immediate need: downloading seven years of emails via IMAP from her server at Rackspace, which we are leaving because the company failed spectacularly in a ransomware attack and is unworthy of customer faith. It has taken most of a week so far to download 390,000 emails, and we would like to speed that up.

I'd setup mbsync in the cloud somewhere, and suck things down into that,
then rsync it down to your laptop. This would give you all your email,
quickly somewhere else. I have 80Gbs to spare on most of the 15 boxes
I have, if that would be enough? If so, let me know, I can help you
set that up. Send me an ssh key?

It is vastly more possible nowadays to run your own email server using
a docker container, btw, that does all the right things out of the
box. I am fleeing the cloud on this front as fast as I can.

> I'm less lucky, since my mail (unlike hers) was on the Rackspace Exchange server, which was the target of the attack. I have been unable to retrieve anything so far, and I am losing hope that I ever will.

Ouch!

> Anyway, the question is about radically different bufferbloat on two machines connected the same way—and what to do about it.

Packet captures always help me.

>
> Thanks,
>
> Doc
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-- 
This song goes out to all the folk that thought Stadia would work:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dtaht_the-mushroom-song-activity-6981366665607352320-FXtz
Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC

Re: [Starlink] Widely different bufferbloat on two machines connected to one access point

[Ben Greear]

On 1/17/23 08:48, Dave Taht via Starlink wrote:
> This is kind of OT for here, but I'll bite:
> 
> On Tue, Jan 17, 2023 at 8:27 AM Doc Searls via Starlink
> <starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>>
>> A question for the true geniuses here, before I call an Apple one who isn't...
>>
>> We have two laptops here, both feet away from the nearest Eero hot spot in a household network fed by a cable modem, an Aris DOCSIS 3.1 router and a 24-port Netgear switch.
> 
> Eero 5? or 6?

Might be worth sniffing traffic and see if the problem laptop is behaving as far as power-save is
concerned.  It should not be going to sleep often if you are doing a steady download, for instance.

Thanks,
Ben

-- 
Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com