Codel (coddling) in the news

Kamal Mostafa built an Ubuntu 12.4 PPA, and wrote: “The result is very impressive: I see a 30X reduction in ping latency on a fully saturated 10Mbps network, just by switching on the new fq_codel scheduler. For an interactive ssh session over that same saturated 10Mbps network, fq_codel totally eliminates the laggy keyboard response — it feels like there’s no other network traffic at all!”

Steve Gibson, on Steve Gibson’s Security Now podcast said:

“They show charts where they show the throughput under these varying conditions, even though they’re discarding intelligently, and it’s right up between 90 and 100 percent; whereas the traditional algorithms collapse down into the low 10s of percent of overall throughput. It’s just - it’s fantastic. “

Jim Gettys outlined how The internet is broken, and how to fix it …

Dave Miller installed CeroWrt

And then there was the truly mind-bending praise

“These extra-ordinary people, today, are silently fixing tomorrow’s internet. And they deserve big props for that. All you technologists who didn’t get a chance to appreciate Nikola Tesla or Dennis Ritchie, here is your chance to do that for some of the real heroes of our time.”

I’m not going to let this last bit of exuberance get to me - as I remember how Tesla ended up, after suffering through decades of patent battles. I’m glad Van and Kathie didn’t patent codel - and equally glad the reference implementations and sims we did are available under a dual BSD/GPL license, so anyone can use them.

Because we all need a better internet.

And that said, much work remains - analysis and improvements to codel with ecn continues, wifi is still troublesome, 95% of the linux drivers don’t have BQL support, and so on.

We’re keeping links to useful code and data on http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki - if you are doing any serious analysis of codel and fq_codel, or have it running on a new OS, please let us know.