Notable Quotes

(Starring in alphabetical order)

Vint Cerf

“Bufferbloat is a huge problem. The only way we’re going to fix this problem is to get the people making the devices that have these large scale buffers in them to artificially reduce their size. The problem is a feedback loop - it takes too long to discover that there is a problem because we allow everything to fill up the buffers. Because memory got cheap, people stuff buffers in because they thought it would help… and in fact at some point it doesn’t. I hope that Gettys and others are able to persuade people that they really need to re-engineer systems to not have more memory than is absolutely necessary. [elided] How many bad things have happened and somebody said ‘I was only trying to help?’.”
– from his keynote speech at the 2011 Linux Users Conference

Denton Gentry

“Our biggest mistake was in making queue management optional, and making it scary.”

Van Jacobson

“Something else that has impeded progress here—all that R&D aimed at maximizing the bandwidth between supercomputer centers. Remember that most of the network research in the U.S. has been funded so far by the NSF (National Science Foundation) with the goal of demonstrating very high bandwidth between academic institutions. This is great for the .01 percent of the Internet community that has those links available to them, but it doesn’t do much good for the billion other people in the world who have 2-megabit or less. We’ve put a lot of effort into protocol, router, and algorithm development that makes it possible for a single TCP to saturate a 40-gigabit link, but we haven’t put anything even remotely like that effort into producing usable cellphone data links, DSL links, or home-cable links. That’s where the really hard problem is because it requires that you start to think about how the buffering actually works and how it turns into latency.”

Paul Jenkins

“Without this being resolved, Internet phones are dead in the long run as more people are jamming up the Internet with Roku, Hulu and Netflix – streaming video Internet no doubt exasperating the present problem. And gamers, who are willing to spend heavily to win, may give up if their Internet connection makes it impossible to win. ”

Rob Landley

“The end result [of bufferbloat] is crazy bursts of throughput and multisecond latency spikes.”

Kathleen Nichols

“Most traffic control mechanisms do not work the way people think they work. Intuition fails us.”

Eric Raymond

“Wow. This is not complicated. How did we miss this for so long?”

Dave Täht

“After going off this cliff, we need to replace the wheels and engine, and strap on wings before we hit bottom.”

Linus Torvalds

“Latency is more important than throughput. It’s that simple.”

Nick Weaver

“When testing for this particular problem, the outliers actually prove to be the good networks.”