Power impact of debufferbloating

You miss the point. Yes, in principle that is the solution. But, right now, it just doesn't work. I turned on traffic shaping, and it had no effect whatsoever. That's because traffic shaping only applies to packets that are in the qdisc buffer. Packets only end up in the qdisc buffer if the device buffer is full, but device buffers are so large that they never fill up unless you either have a very high bandwidth connection, or have made the buffers smaller by hand. After I hacked my kernel to reduce the device buffer sizes, traffic shaping started working, so that makes reducing buffer sizes a reasonable short-term solution, but in the long-term it produces other bad effects like Arjan points out.

Actually, there is one other way to make traffic shaping work -- if you throttle your outgoing bandwidth, then that throttling is applied in between the qdisc and the device buffers, so the device buffers stop filling up. Lots of docs on traffic shaping say that this is a good idea to work around problems with your ISP's queue management, but in fact it's needed just to work around problems within your own kernel's queue management. Also, you can't really do it for wifi since you don't know what the outgoing bandwidth is at any given time, and in the case of 802.11n, this will actually *reduce* that bandwidth because hiding packets from the device driver will screw up its ability to do aggregation.