Introduction to Bufferbloat

Bufferbloat is the undesirable latency that comes from a router or other network equipment buffering too much data.

TL;DR

1. To measure bufferbloat, go to Waveform, Speedtest.net, or Cloudflare, or read more at the Tests for Bufferbloat page.
2. To fix your bufferbloat, check out What Can I Do About Bufferbloat?

The Details

We’ve written an introduction to the bufferbloat problem that we believe is both accessible to non-technical readers and informative to techies. We recommend you start there to get a feel for the nature and scope of the problem. Then, read our mission statement to find out what we’re doing about it.

There’s also a glossary that goes into more technical depth on bufferbloat-related terminology. You may find an older technical introduction interesting if you are a programmer or network engineer.

More reading

Many of the symptoms of bufferbloat-induced congestion have an immediate, user-visible impact on performance. If you’re not sure you are seeing these, there are experiments you can perform on your home hardware to detect bufferbloat problems. If you want to jump straight to fixing the problem, we have a mitigation and solutions page.

Much of the original analysis and discussion of bufferbloat took place on technical blogs. We have collected a tasty selection of blog references for your reading pleasure.

You can read bufferbloat-related quotes from the great, near-great, and and not-so-great. A page of unashamedly geeky humor exists as well.

There is also a list of product specific pages.

Mailing lists and Participating

Our project has very active mailing lists on which we’re developing anti-bufferbloat fixes, diagnostic tools, documentation, and other fun things. You can also look at a ToDo list of projects that need work.