Elephant in the room - Akamai

Michael Thomas mike at mtcc.com
Fri Dec 6 18:33:46 UTC 2019


On 12/5/19 6:02 PM, Valdis Klētnieks wrote:
> On Thu, 05 Dec 2019 14:18:07 -0800, Michael Thomas said:
>
>> My suspicion is that the root problem was buffer bloat -- i flashed a
>> new router with openwrt and was a little dismayed that the bufferbloat
>> code is a plugin you have to enable. The buffer bloat got a lot better
> Friends don't let friends run factory firmware. :)
>
> Hopefully sometime soon the SQM stuff will be added to the default  openwrt
> configs for most of the supported routers, if it hasn't been already. It's been
> in my config since before the Luci support for SQM got created....
>
> The big problem is that a lot of eyeball networks have a lot of CPE boxes that
> were created before the bufferbloat work was done, and often have no real
> motivation to push software updates to the CPE (if they even have the ability),
> and a lot of customers have routers that they bought at Best Buy or Walmart
> that will *never* get a software update.
>
> (I also admit having no idea what percentage of the intermediate routers in the
> ISP's networks have gotten de-bloating code.
>

So I tested this out again after I sent out my message and it does 
indeed seem to be just fine: it wasn't an identical test since my friend 
was over wifi, but that really shouldn't affect things, I'd think.

The thing I don't get is that buffer bloat is a creature of the 
upstream, right? I wouldn't think that the stream of acks sent from 
downloading the file would put much pressure on the upstream. Which 
makes me wonder if it's just that the old router itself was saturated 
and couldn't keep up. Or something.

In any case, there are probably zillions of 10 year old routers out in 
the world, and no matter what exactly caused this for me it will 
probably happen for zillions of other people too. Hope support desks are 
ready for the deluge.

Mike




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