The first 34 days

The Bufferbloat project news summary, February 17 - March 3, 2011

I’m going to try to put out summary news like this once a month in
the future. This is just a summary of the past two weeks. For a summary
of the first two weeks, see here .

For those of you new to bufferbloat, the fastest way to get up to speed
is to review Jim Gettys’ presentation: Bufferbloat - Dark buffers on the Internet
and the audio recording

In March, I hope we start to get some patches tested by lots more people,
start getting the qdisc folk to talk to the driver folk (and vice versa)
and continue to unify several separate lines of development. I hope also
we improve the wiki, and continue to recruit more people with different
layers of perspectives and understandings of the problem. Late this month
a new (8 core) server will come online at isc.org for use for building
both debloat-testing and openwrt based kernels for various devices. More
servers and locations will follow.

Extremely high on the list is getting more testing tools modified not only
to detect bufferbloat, but test the new kernel features to see how well they
are working.

Development

The Debloat-testing Linux
kernel tree has been updated to 2.6.38-rc7-db. John Linville made an abortive
attempt to move it into the qdisc layer. There are other issues…

Statistics

There are now 181 people registered in the general bufferbloat email list
and 42 in bufferbloat development list

41 people have registered on the bufferbloat project web site .
I seem to be the only one making edits. Is there something broken?

35 people (and one robot) regularly in the #bufferbloat irc channel on chat.freenode.net.

References to “bufferbloat” on google doubled from roughly 30,000 to 61,200 results.

(Bufferbloat is now .00053% as popular as sex)

Web hits on the presentations and site itself are not yet available.

We survived slashdot!

The thoroughly debloated servers bufferbloat.net is running on survived both a
discussion on lwn.net and a slo-mo slashdotting on the
Got (bufferbloat) Bloat thread.
Slashdot unfortunately got the link to the debloat-testing tree wrong, and never corrected it.

Blog posts & media coverage related to Bufferbloat (most recent first)

Richard Pitt “Usage Based Billing - it’s all about perceived congestion”:http://digital-rag.com/article.php/All-About-Perceived-Congestion-UBB Jim Gettys “ECN study results from MIT”:http://gettys.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/caida-workshop-aims-2011-bauer-and-beverly-ecn-results/ Jim Gettys “Benchmarking Broadband”:http://gettys.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/caida-workshop/ Brian Proffitt “Latency under Load”:http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netsp/article.php/39260760 Richard Pitt “Bufferbloat and your ISP’s problem”:http://digital-rag.com/article.php/Buffer-Bloat-Packet-Loss “Joe Brockmeier”:http://www.networkworld.com/community/zonker “The fight against Bufferbloat”:http://www.networkworld.com/community/fight-against-bufferbloat Jim Gettys, Dave Täht “Bufferbloat and VOIP podcast”:http://www.voipusersconference.org/2011/bufferbloat/ Jim Gettys “A call for help with Bufferbloat animations”:http://gettys.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/animation-to-show-bufferbloat-badly-needed/

While bufferbloat is not a Linux-specific problem, we’re the first community out the gate with
solutions and patches. We are actively looking for iphone, ipad, and android users to test
some basic assumptions regarding ECN.
(if you are on an iphone, and having trouble
accessing this site or this mp3 , please let us know!)

And there are tons of Papers|research papers, tools and Linux Tips linked to off of our wiki that need sorting out.

Principal threads of conversation so far this month:

Getting more organized
GSO: https://lists.bufferbloat.net/pipermail/bloat-devel/2011-March/000077.html Usage based billing

… (Still ongoing from last month)

Shifting the Market - How to get the word out? (#33)
SFB - Discussion of the features of Stochastic fair blue queuing, with Juliusz Chroboczek , the author of the SFB patch for the Linux kernel
The dangers of AQM - a cautionary note about Active Queue Management, by Kathie Nichols and Van Jacobson
Bufferbloat and You - a draft contributed by Eric Raymond, Much discussion as to good analogies for how the Internet really works ensued
About LEDBAT, µTP and BitTorrent - an exploration of the issues and advantages of bittorrent
TCP Vegas vs Cubic - Some Experiment_-_TCP_cubic_vs_TCP_vegas|puzzling data about TCP vegas with current hardware
The wireless problem in a nutshell The unique problems 802.11 introduces for TCP/ip (related: Wireless multiqueue behavior )

Progress on the wiki and infrastructure

The wiki needs some serious love. Help merely on defining some terms would be good.