On Mon, Oct 17, 2022 at 5:02 PM Stuart Cheshire <[email protected]> wrote:

> Accuracy be damned. The analogy to common experience resonates more.

I feel it is not an especially profound insight to observe that, “people don’t 
like waiting in line.” The conclusion, “therefore privileged people should get 
to go to the front,” describes an airport first class checkin counter, Disney 
Fastpass, and countless other analogies from everyday life, all of which are 
the wrong solution for packets in a network.

> I think the person with the cheetos pulling out a gun and shooting everyone 
> in front of him (AQM) would not go down well.

Which is why starting with a bad analogy (people waiting in a grocery store) 
inevitably leads to bad conclusions.

If we want to struggle to make the grocery store analogy work, perhaps we show 
people checking some grocery store app on their smartphone before they leave 
home, and if they see that a long line is beginning to form they wait until 
later, when the line is shorter. The challenge is not how to deal with a long 
queue when it’s there, it is how to avoid a long queue in the first place.

> Actually that analogy is fairly close to fair queuing. The multiple checker 
> analogy is one of the most common analogies in queue theory itself.

I disagree. You are describing the “FQ” part of FQ_CoDel. It’s the “CoDel” part 
of FQ_CoDel that solves bufferbloat. FQ has been around for a long time, and at 
best it partially masked the effects of bufferbloat. Having more queues does 
not solve bufferbloat. Managing the queue(s) better solves bufferbloat.

> I like the idea of a guru floating above a grocery cart with a better string 
> of explanations, explaining
> 
>   - "no, grasshopper, the solution to bufferbloat is no line... at all".

That is the kind of thing I had in mind. Or a similar quote from The Matrix. 
While everyone is debating ways to live with long queues, the guru asks, “What 
if there were no queues?” That is the “mind blown” realization.

Stuart Cheshire

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