> On 29 Mar, 2015, at 11:04, sahil grover <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> (1) All say bufferSize should be set very large for bufferbloat to occur.
>  
> But how much large?? is there any condition?

There’s a clue in the name: if the buffer is significantly larger than it needs 
to be (and is unmanaged), we call that bufferbloat.

If the buffer is too small to absorb a typical burst of packets, the resulting 
increase in packet loss will cause a reduction in throughput.  The correct size 
for an unmanaged buffer is typically the delay-bandwidth product, which enables 
it to absorb a transitory burst from a single TCP flow.

However, determining the delay is difficult a priori, and frequently differs 
substantially between different flows on the same connection.  So we usually 
make some reasonable assumption about the delay component of that formula: 
100ms is typical for a broadband connection to the public Internet, and VoIP 
can just-about cope with that in practice.

Or, to put it another way - if the buffer *induces* significantly more than 
100ms delay under load, that is bufferbloat.

> (2) even after setting buffersize very  very large,  if packets get dropped 
> due to buffer  
> overflow  when heavy traffic is there.
> 
> is it bufferbloat?

Yes.  Packet loss has nothing to do with it - it’s the induced delay that 
matters.

> sholud we take care that maximum limit of buffersize is never reached and no 
> packet  drop is there due to queue overlow for bufferbloat condition?

Extremely large buffers are usually the result of hardware engineers naively 
attempting to achieve zero packet loss, by providing buffers larger than the 
TCP receive window size.  (That is a futile goal - rwnd is unlimited in modern 
operating systems which support window scaling.)  However, zero packet loss is 
not a necessary condition.

AQMs often deliberately drop packets in order to signal congestion to the 
endpoints.  Under some circumstances, this can actually result in less overall 
packet loss than on an unmanaged buffer.  Even without ECN, the AQM rarely 
causes burst losses, whereas overflowing an unmanaged queue often does.  With 
ECN, an AQM can often signal congestion sufficiently well without dropping any 
packets at all.

 - Jonathan Morton

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