Great topic, indeed!

We (almost?) all know that we can put a linux box between our network and
the Internet and apply cake on the WAN interface (may be an ingress too)
and most of the bufferbloat problems disappear

One thing I suggest is to bring more cake awareness in other communities
and commercial products to support it.

As an example, a was unable to find a way to get cake on pfSense/opnSense
(may be FreeBSD doesn't support cake?) only something similar to fq_codel.

In worst shape, are products like Mikrotik, used by quite a few "network
professionals" and some ISPs, where I was unable to find any way to get
ride of bufferbloat



Thanks!


El lun., 10 ago. 2020 a las 14:58, Jonathan Foulkes (<[email protected]>)
escribió:

> Hi David,
>
> Great topic, and glad you brought it up, as increasing awareness of all
> the goodness that de-bloating brings to end users is important, especially
> with all the WFH and soon, teaching/learning going on these days.
>
> Background / disclosure: I’m the founder and CEO of Evenroute, so first,
> thank you for your order :-)  Second, please let me know if you have any
> questions once you get the unit. Happy to personally support you, or any
> member of this list.
>
> Given I have access to the combined data of the deployed IQrouter fleet, I
> have a pretty good view of how well Cake performs in the real world, as we
> are on nearly every ISP domestically (US) and a surprising number of
> International deployments as well (even though we only market in the US).
> as you might imagine, given our marketing, we have a huge number of users
> with really bad lines, or on challenging tech, like WISPs & Satellite. So
> we get to see the worst of the worst.
> But interestingly enough, we also have a certain amount of users with
> extremely low and stable latencies with no QoS, yet they still continue to
> deploy their IQrouters, likely because the prior ISP-supplied device
> *added* latencies, and the benefits of fairness in the per-device, per-host
> settings in Cake, plus correctly prioritizing based on type & DSCP marks
> (most WiFi-calling smartphone traffic is correctly marked).
>
> Are the risks and tradeoffs well enough understood (and visible enough
> for troubleshooting) to recommend broader deployment?
>
> We’ve been deploying SQM / CAKE for 4+ years in the IQrouter, and while we
> have evolved a lot of our algorithms do deal with the millions of
> permutations in configurations and settings, I’ve seen SQM and lately CAKE
> likewise mature, and my assessment is they are indeed ready for prime time
> in terms of foundational tech.
> The challenge is not the core tech, it’s accessibility. That was my take
> in 2015 when I first discovered it, and led to the founding of my company.
>
> As for troubleshooting visibility, check out the Status->Ping Stats page
> once your IQrouter has been running for a few days. Very helpful in
> triaging modem and line issues. Basically its a line capacity usage monitor
> and ping plotter.
>
> but in my view we haven't converted "grandma".
>
>
> Because until I produced a product with zero user configuration
> requirements (relative to QoS), ‘grandma’ was never a viable user.
> Back story: I live in a large (3,000 homes) development in a rural area,
> most residents are retired professionals and DSL was the only choice up
> until recently, so a bunch of non-technical grandma's and grandpas are my
> neighbors. The IQrouter was developed to meet the needs of that audience.
> Grandma should be able to deploy in 15 minutes and have a de-bloated DSL
> connection that got rid of the 5,000ms+ lag spikes. So initial config
> workflow, and all the tuning and dynamic line adaptation were largely born
> of dealing with my local needs.
>
> Funny enough, our focus on non-techie usability led to a skeptical
> backlash from some ’techies’, who find our marketing messaging and simple
> UI too off-putting for them. Even though we do expose the full native UI
> for OpenWRT under the ‘Advanced Menus’ option. Heck, you can even instal
> OpenWRT packages on this thing.
> Smart techies love though, a recent IT guy wrote in response to our
> support team letting him know about OpenWRT support was: "Now, I know
> that this really is the *best router* for all consumers to use in their
> homes!”. We made his WISP service usable.
>
> Because of the degree to which we're working from home and
> videoconferencing, a lot of low-price, medium-performance devices are
> suddenly too wimpy for their new role.
>
> Big time. As noted above, it not just the CPE devices, it’s the congestion
> on the backhauls that causes issues, and it’s everything from DSL (slammed
> DSLAMs are endemic) to cable systems with oversubscribed local loops and
> congested CMTS backhaul. Hell, even fiber to the home ISPs manage to have
> variable capacity (and bloat) in the evenings.
> Traffic management is a requirement these days.
>
> I propose we show the results in terms that we can explain to Grandma,
> specifically concentrating on functioning VOIP.
>
>
> This is desperately needed, as there need to be more points of proof and
> articles outlining the problem, and the impacts of resolving it with
> effective traffic management.
>
> Stuff like this article from Jim Gettys on the needs of teachers. BTW- he
> calls out the IQrouter as his ‘Go to’ recommendation for non-techies. He
> runs one himself and gave one to his non-techie brother. Bufferbloat in
> Action due to Covid-19
> <https://gettys.wordpress.com/2020/04/22/bufferbloat-in-action-due-to-covid-19/>
>
> More comments on other response later, got work to do ;-)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jonathan Foulkes
>
>
> On Aug 10, 2020, at 8:57 AM, David Collier-Brown <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> On 2020-08-09 5:35 p.m., Jonathan Morton wrote:
>
> Are the risks and tradeoffs well enough understood (and visible enough
> for troubleshooting) to recommend broader deployment?
>
> I recently gave openwrt a try on some hardware that I ultimately
> concluded was insufficient for the job.  Fairly soon after changing out
> my access point, I started getting complaints of Wi-Fi dropping in my
> household, especially when someone was trying to videoconference.  I
> discovered that my AP was spontaneously rebooting, and the box was
> getting hot.
>
> Most CPE devices these days rely on hardware accelerated packet forwarding to 
> achieve their published specs.  That's all about taking packets in one side 
> and pushing them out the other as quickly as possible, with only minimal 
> support from the CPU (likely, new connections get a NAT/firewall lookup, 
> that's all).  It has the advantages of speed and power efficiency, but 
> unfortunately it is also incompatible with our debloating efforts.  So 
> debloated CPE will tend to run hotter and with lower peak throughput, which 
> may be noticeable to cable and fibre users; VDSL (FTTC) users might have 
> service of 80Mbps or less where this effect is less likely to matter.
>
> It sounds like that AP had a very marginal thermal design which caused the 
> hardware to overheat as soon as the CPU was under significant load, which it 
> can easily be when a shaper and AQM are running on it at high throughput.  
> The cure is to use better designed hardware, though you could also 
> contemplate breaking the case open to cure the thermal problem directly.  
> There are some known reliable models which could be collected into a list.  
> As a rule of thumb, the ones based on ARM cores are likely to be designed 
> with CPU performance more in mind than those with MIPS.
>
> Cake has some features which can be used to support explicit classification 
> and (de)prioritisation of traffic via firewall marking rules, either by 
> rewriting the Diffserv field or by associating metadata with packets within 
> the network stack (fwmark).  This can be very useful for pushing Bittorrent 
> or WinUpdate swarm traffic out of the way.  But for most situations, the 
> default flow-isolating behaviour already works pretty well, especially for 
> ensuring that one computer's network load has only a bounded effect on any 
> other.  We can discuss that in more detail if that would be helpful.
>
> I'm primarily thinking of *this week's* version of the home router
> problem (;-))
>
> Because of the degree to which we're working from home and
> videoconferencing, a lot of low-price, medium-performance devices are
> suddenly too wimpy for their new role.
>
> A (very!) draft version is up in Google docs, at
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gWKp9HqTbuHLfgD59WU4KJ8Og3eHuBtIeC7BUK0Ju9w/edit?usp=sharing
>
> Using myself as the guinea-pig, running pfifo-fast was clearly bad,
> fq_codel was better, and cake was good with a newish Fedora and the stock
> Rogers router.  It's been a while since I did rrul tests, and in any case,
> I think that to convince readers we need a very practical way of making it
> clear that they have a problem. I'm thinking that making VOIP fail might do
> the trick (;-))
>
> The hard part, IMHO, is constructing a test that immediately communicates
> the idea that the reader has a problem, and that CAKE addresses it.
>
> Returning to the hardware question, https://evenroute.com/iqrv3 seems to
> be capable of handling up to ~300 Mbit/S connections, and my ISP only
> delivers 170 (and advertises 150, which is mildly surprising!)
>
> I just ordered one, so I'll have a 'plug in" example, along with
> reflashing my linksys for the umpty-thousandth time.
>
> --dave
>
>  I suspect not enough people are aware of the later efforts of the
> bufferbloat team, so I'm thinking of one or two articles, starting with LWN
> and an audience of aficionados.
>
> The core community is aware of what we've done, but in my view we haven't
> converted "grandma". Grandma, as well as a whole bunch of ordinary
> engineers and partners of engineers, are dependent on debloated performance
> because they're working at home now, and competing with granddaughter
> playing video games while they're trying to hold a video call.
>
> Right now, my colleagues at work suffer from more than a second of
> bloat-related lag. They therefore tend to speak over each other on
> con-calls, apologize, start again and talk over each other, again. After a
> little while, the picture becomes a distinctly silly one: a bunch of grown
> adults putting their hands up and waving, like little kids in school.
> No-one has called out “me, me, teacher” yet, but I expect it any time.
>
> I propose we show the results in terms that we can explain to Grandma,
> specifically concentrating on functioning VOIP. I just upgraded to Fedora
> 31, and the networking is absolutely stock, so I make a perfect
> victim/guinea-pig (;-))
>
> Who's interested?
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
> System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the 
> [email protected]           |                      -- Mark Twain
>
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