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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