Tag Archives: buffers

Cerowrt

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CeroWrt is a project built on the OpenWrt firmware to resolve the endemic problems of bufferbloat in home networking today, and to push forward the state of the art of edge networks and routers. Projects include proper IPv6 support, tighter integration with DNSSEC, and most importantly, reducing bufferbloat in both the wired and wireless components of the stack.

via Cerowrt – Overview – Bufferbloat.

From their wiki page on buffer bloat:

Bufferbloat is a huge drag on Internet performance created, ironically, by previous attempts to make it work better. The one-sentence summary is “Bloated buffers lead to network-crippling latency spikes.”

The bad news is that bufferbloat is everywhere, in more devices and programs than you can shake a stick at. The good news is, bufferbloat is relatively easy to fix. The even better news is that fixing it may solve a lot of the service problems now addressed by bandwidth caps and metering, making the Internet faster and less expensive for both consumers and providers.

Linux 3.3: Finally a little good news for bufferbloat

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I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Linux 3.3: Finally a little good news for bufferbloat – Cringely on technology.

Bufferbloat, as you’ll recall from my 2011 predictions column, is the result of our misguided attempt to protect streaming applications (now 80 percent of Internet packets) by putting large memory buffers in modems, routers, network cards, and applications. These cascading buffers interfere with each other and with the flow control built into TCP from the very beginning, ultimately breaking that flow control, making things far worse than they’d be if all those buffers simply didn’t exist.

Bufferbloat was named by Jim Gettys of Bell Labs, who has become our chief defender against the scourge, attempting to coordinate what’s become a global response to the problem.

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What AQM does is monitor the buffer, and signal the end points to slow down any time the buffer starts to fill, either due to that one transfer or competing transfers, by dropping or marking packets.  So the buffer is kept (almost) empty, except when it is handling a burst of traffic. So the steady state latency of the buffer, rather than being the size of the buffer, is set by the size of the bursts in traffic.  The size of the buffer becomes almost irrelevant.