bufferbloat in the fediverse [LWN.net]

bufferbloat in the fediverse

Posted Dec 2, 2022 14:16 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: bufferbloat in the fediverse by mtaht
Parent article: Microblogging with ActivityPub

I think, personally, that a core part of the issue is that most of the fixes for bufferbloat involve making metrics worse for a few edge cases (packet loss counters when at saturation, for example), in return for a big improvement that's not hugely visible in metrics for the vast majority of traffic.

And so, where you're asking people to change from the defaults, you're asking them to regress one or two metrics they've "always" paid attention to, without improving other metrics they pay attention to. This is obviously a bad things to do - why make the numbers worse? - and thus you struggle unless your changes are the defaults (at which point, when they look into their tweaks, they find they make the metric better at the expense of something they actually care about).

Basically the traditional confusion between a metric and an outcome :-(

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bufferbloat in the fediverse

Posted Dec 2, 2022 14:53 UTC (Fri) by gioele (subscriber, #61675) [Link] (1 responses)

> I think, personally, that a core part of the issue is that most of the fixes for bufferbloat involve making metrics worse for a few edge cases (packet loss counters when at saturation, for example), in return for a big improvement that's not hugely visible in metrics for the vast majority of traffic.

Isn't that addressed by publicizing another contrasting metric?

"Yes packet loss counters went 2.7% up, but 95%-ile latency is down by 84.3%!"

bufferbloat in the fediverse

Posted Dec 2, 2022 15:37 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

My experience of debloating a network that's not a bottleneck is that that's not actually what you get; packet loss goes up 4%, but 99-%ile throughput and latency are unchanged. And it's hard to explain that this is actually a win - that what I've actually done is get you to a point where instead of needing expensive network upgrades when traffic doubles, you can hold off until traffic triples - because that's something in the far future.

Fortunately, the network I debloated was my home network, so while I can see that no metrics have improved significantly, I'm happy that I'll be able to run on the existing hardware even as demand increases.