Re: [Bloat] datapoint from one vendor regarding bloat

2019-04-11 Thread Holland, Jake
Ah, I see what you mean.  Yes, this makes sense as a major concern worth 
checking,
thanks for explaining.

-Jake

On 2019-04-11, 17:37, "Jonathan Morton"  wrote:

> On 12 Apr, 2019, at 2:56 am, Holland, Jake  wrote:
> 
> But in practice do you expect link speed changes to be a major issue?

For wireline, consider ADSL2+.  Maximum downstream link speed is 24Mbps, 
impaired somewhat by ATM framing but let's ignore that for now.  A basic 
"poverty package" might limit to 4Mbps; already a 6:1 ratio.  In rural areas 
the "last mile" copper may be so long and noisy for certain individual 
subscribers that only 128Kbps is available; this is now a 192:1 ratio, turning 
10ms into almost 2 seconds if uncompensated from the headline 24Mbps rate.  
Mind you, 10ms is too short to get even a single packet through at 128Kbps, so 
you'd need to put in a failsafe.

That's on wireline, where link speed changes are relatively infrequent and 
usually minor, so it's easy to signal changes back to some discrete policer box 
(usually called a BRAS in an ADSL context).  That may be what you have in mind.

One could, and should, also consider wireless technologies.  A given 
handset on a given SIM card may expect 100Mbps LTE under ideal conditions, in a 
major city during the small hours, but might only have a dodgy EDGE signal on a 
desolate hilltop a few hours later.  (Here in Finland, cell coverage was 
greatly improved in rural areas by cascading old 2G equipment from urban areas 
that received 3G upgrades, so this is not at all uncommon.)  In general, 
wireless links change rate rapidly and unpredictably in reaction to propagation 
conditions as the handset moves (or, for fixed stations, as the weather 
changes), and the ratio of possible link rates is even more severe than the 
ADSL example above.

Often a "poverty package" is implemented through a shaper rather than a 
policer, backed by a dumb FIFO on which no right-sizing has been considered 
(even though the link rate is obviously known in advance).  On one of these, I 
have personally experienced 40+ seconds of delay, rendering the connection 
useless for other purposes while any sort of sustained download was in 
progress.  In fact, that's one of the incidents which got me seriously 
interested in congestion control; at the time, I hacked the Linux TCP stack to 
right-size the receive window, and directed most of my traffic through a proxy 
running on that machine.  This was sufficient to restore some usability.

I find it notable that ISPs mostly consider only policers for congestion 
signalling, and rarely deploy even these to all the places where congestion may 
reasonably occur.

 - Jonathan Morton



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Re: [Bloat] datapoint from one vendor regarding bloat

2019-04-11 Thread Jonathan Morton
> On 12 Apr, 2019, at 2:56 am, Holland, Jake  wrote:
> 
> But in practice do you expect link speed changes to be a major issue?

For wireline, consider ADSL2+.  Maximum downstream link speed is 24Mbps, 
impaired somewhat by ATM framing but let's ignore that for now.  A basic 
"poverty package" might limit to 4Mbps; already a 6:1 ratio.  In rural areas 
the "last mile" copper may be so long and noisy for certain individual 
subscribers that only 128Kbps is available; this is now a 192:1 ratio, turning 
10ms into almost 2 seconds if uncompensated from the headline 24Mbps rate.  
Mind you, 10ms is too short to get even a single packet through at 128Kbps, so 
you'd need to put in a failsafe.

That's on wireline, where link speed changes are relatively infrequent and 
usually minor, so it's easy to signal changes back to some discrete policer box 
(usually called a BRAS in an ADSL context).  That may be what you have in mind.

One could, and should, also consider wireless technologies.  A given handset on 
a given SIM card may expect 100Mbps LTE under ideal conditions, in a major city 
during the small hours, but might only have a dodgy EDGE signal on a desolate 
hilltop a few hours later.  (Here in Finland, cell coverage was greatly 
improved in rural areas by cascading old 2G equipment from urban areas that 
received 3G upgrades, so this is not at all uncommon.)  In general, wireless 
links change rate rapidly and unpredictably in reaction to propagation 
conditions as the handset moves (or, for fixed stations, as the weather 
changes), and the ratio of possible link rates is even more severe than the 
ADSL example above.

Often a "poverty package" is implemented through a shaper rather than a 
policer, backed by a dumb FIFO on which no right-sizing has been considered 
(even though the link rate is obviously known in advance).  On one of these, I 
have personally experienced 40+ seconds of delay, rendering the connection 
useless for other purposes while any sort of sustained download was in 
progress.  In fact, that's one of the incidents which got me seriously 
interested in congestion control; at the time, I hacked the Linux TCP stack to 
right-size the receive window, and directed most of my traffic through a proxy 
running on that machine.  This was sufficient to restore some usability.

I find it notable that ISPs mostly consider only policers for congestion 
signalling, and rarely deploy even these to all the places where congestion may 
reasonably occur.

 - Jonathan Morton

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Re: [Bloat] datapoint from one vendor regarding bloat

2019-04-11 Thread Holland, Jake
On 2019-04-11, 11:29, "Jonathan Morton"  wrote:
> A question I would ask, though, is whether that 10ms automatically scales to 
> the actual link rate, or whether it is pre-calculated for the fastest rate 
> and then actually turns into a larger time value when the link rate drops.  
> That's a common fault with sizing FIFOs, too.

That's an interesting question and maybe a useful experiment, if somebody's
got one of these boxes.

But in practice do you expect link speed changes to be a major issue?  Would
this just be an extra point that should also be tuned if the max link speed is
changed dramatically by config and the policer is turned on (so there's, say, a
5% increased chance of misconfig and a reasonably diagnosable problem that a
knowledgebase post somewhere would end up covering once somebody's dug into it),
or is there a deeper problem if it's pre-calculated for the fastest rate?

-Jake


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Re: [Bloat] datapoint from one vendor regarding bloat

2019-04-11 Thread Jonathan Morton
> On 11 Apr, 2019, at 9:00 pm, Holland, Jake  wrote:
> 
> MBS = maximum burst size
> PIR = peak information rate
> CBS = committed burst size
> CIR = committed information rate

Ah, this is enough to map the terms onto my prior knowledge of TBFs.  (In my 
considered opinion, TBFs are obsolete technology for shaping - but there is a 
lot of deployed hardware still using them.)

So what this boils down to is a two-stage TBF policer.  From idle, such a 
system will let a burst of traffic through unfiltered, then start dropping once 
the bucket is empty; the bucket is refilled at some configured rate.  The 
two-stage system allows implementation of "PowerBoost" style policies.

The practical effect is that if there's a 10ms burst permitted, there may be 
10ms of traffic collecting in some downstream dumb FIFO.  This depends on fine 
details of the network topology, but this is the main reason I implemented a 
deficit-mode "virtual clock" shaper in Cake, which has no initial burst.  With 
that said, 10ms isn't too bad in itself.

A question I would ask, though, is whether that 10ms automatically scales to 
the actual link rate, or whether it is pre-calculated for the fastest rate and 
then actually turns into a larger time value when the link rate drops.  That's 
a common fault with sizing FIFOs, too.

> Pages 1185 thru 1222 of the referenced doc* are actually really interesting 
> reading
> and an excellent walk-through of their token bucket concept and how to use it.

Nearly 40 pages?  I have work to do, y'know!

I did just glance through it, and it looks like exactly the sort of arcane 
system which ISPs would *want* to leave well alone in its default 
configuration, or make only the simplest and easiest-to-understand changes to.  
There's obviously a lot of support for Diffserv designed into it, but nobody 
really knows how to configure a given Diffserv implementation to work well in 
the general case, simply because Diffserv itself is under-specified.

 - Jonathan Morton

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Re: [Bloat] datapoint from one vendor regarding bloat

2019-04-11 Thread Luca Muscariello
Defs

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2697


On Thu 11 Apr 2019 at 19:54, Jonathan Morton  wrote:

> > On 11 Apr, 2019, at 1:38 pm, Mikael Abrahamsson 
> wrote:
> >
> > The mbs defines the MBS for the PIR bucket and the cbs defines the CBS
> for the CIR bucket
>
> What do these lumps of jargon refer to?
>
>  - Jonathan Morton
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Re: [Bloat] datapoint from one vendor regarding bloat

2019-04-11 Thread Jan Ceuleers
On 11/04/2019 19:54, Jonathan Morton wrote:
>> On 11 Apr, 2019, at 1:38 pm, Mikael Abrahamsson  wrote:
>>
>> The mbs defines the MBS for the PIR bucket and the cbs defines the CBS for 
>> the CIR bucket
> 
> What do these lumps of jargon refer to?

If you're truly interested in the answer: the document Mikael links to
contains the answers.
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Re: [Bloat] datapoint from one vendor regarding bloat

2019-04-11 Thread Holland, Jake
MBS = maximum burst size
PIR = peak information rate
CBS = committed burst size
CIR = committed information rate

Pages 1185 thru 1222 of the referenced doc* are actually really interesting 
reading
and an excellent walk-through of their token bucket concept and how to use it.

Best,
Jake

*
https://infoproducts.alcatel-lucent.com/cgi-bin/dbaccessfilename.cgi/3HE13300TQZZA01_V1_Advanced%20Configuration%20Guide%20for%207450%20ESS%207750%20SR%20and%207950%20XRS%20for%20Releases%20up%20to%2014.0.R7%20-%20Part%20II.pdf


On 2019-04-11, 10:54, "Jonathan Morton"  wrote:

> On 11 Apr, 2019, at 1:38 pm, Mikael Abrahamsson  wrote:
> 
> The mbs defines the MBS for the PIR bucket and the cbs defines the CBS 
for the CIR bucket

What do these lumps of jargon refer to?

 - Jonathan Morton
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Re: [Bloat] datapoint from one vendor regarding bloat

2019-04-11 Thread Jonathan Morton
> On 11 Apr, 2019, at 1:38 pm, Mikael Abrahamsson  wrote:
> 
> The mbs defines the MBS for the PIR bucket and the cbs defines the CBS for 
> the CIR bucket

What do these lumps of jargon refer to?

 - Jonathan Morton
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Re: [Bloat] datapoint from one vendor regarding bloat

2019-04-11 Thread Sebastian Moeller
I just noticed netalyzr shut down last month

On April 11, 2019 2:45:19 PM GMT+02:00, Sebastian Moeller  
wrote:
>Interesting! Thanks for sharing. I wonder what the netalyzr buffertest
>would report for these?
>
>Best Regards
>Sebastian
>
>On April 11, 2019 12:38:54 PM GMT+02:00, Mikael Abrahamsson
> wrote:
>>
>>Hi,
>>
>>I talked to Nokia (former Alcatel/Lucent equipment) regarding their 
>>typical buffer settings on BNG. I thought their answer might be
>>relevant 
>>as a data point for people to have when they do testing:
>>
>>https://infoproducts.alcatel-lucent.com/cgi-bin/dbaccessfilename.cgi/3HE13300TQZZA01_V1_Advanced%20Configuration%20Guide%20for%207450%20ESS%207750%20SR%20and%207950%20XRS%20for%20Releases%20up%20to%2014.0.R7%20-%20Part%20II.pdf
>>
>>"mbs and cbs — The mbs defines the MBS for the PIR bucket and the cbs 
>>defines the CBS for the CIR bucket, both can be configured in bytes or
>
>>kilobytes. Note that the PIR MBS applies to high burst priority
>packets
>>
>>(these are packets whose classification match criteria is configured
>>with 
>>priority high at the ingress and are in-profile packets at the
>egress).
>>
>>Range: mbs=0 to 4194304 bytes; cbs=0 to 4194304 bytes Note: mbs=0
>>prevents 
>>any traffic from being forwarded. Default: mbs=10ms of traffic or 64KB
>>if 
>>PIR=max; cbs=10ms of traffic or 64KB if CIR=max"
>>
>>So the default setting is that they have a 10ms buffer and if a packet
>>is 
>>trying to be inserted into this buffer and it's 10ms full, then that 
>>packet will instead be dropped.
>>
>>They claimed most of their customers (ISPs) just went with this
>setting
>>
>>and didn't change it.
>>
>>Do we have a way to test this kind of setting from the outside, for 
>>instance by sending a large chunk of data at wirespeed and then
>>checking 
>>the characteristics of the buffering/drop for this burst of packets at
>
>>receive side?
>>
>>-- 
>>Mikael Abrahamssonemail: swm...@swm.pp.se
>
>-- 
>Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

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Re: [Bloat] datapoint from one vendor regarding bloat

2019-04-11 Thread Sebastian Moeller
Interesting! Thanks for sharing. I wonder what the netalyzr buffertest would 
report for these?

Best Regards
Sebastian

On April 11, 2019 12:38:54 PM GMT+02:00, Mikael Abrahamsson  
wrote:
>
>Hi,
>
>I talked to Nokia (former Alcatel/Lucent equipment) regarding their 
>typical buffer settings on BNG. I thought their answer might be
>relevant 
>as a data point for people to have when they do testing:
>
>https://infoproducts.alcatel-lucent.com/cgi-bin/dbaccessfilename.cgi/3HE13300TQZZA01_V1_Advanced%20Configuration%20Guide%20for%207450%20ESS%207750%20SR%20and%207950%20XRS%20for%20Releases%20up%20to%2014.0.R7%20-%20Part%20II.pdf
>
>"mbs and cbs — The mbs defines the MBS for the PIR bucket and the cbs 
>defines the CBS for the CIR bucket, both can be configured in bytes or 
>kilobytes. Note that the PIR MBS applies to high burst priority packets
>
>(these are packets whose classification match criteria is configured
>with 
>priority high at the ingress and are in-profile packets at the egress).
>
>Range: mbs=0 to 4194304 bytes; cbs=0 to 4194304 bytes Note: mbs=0
>prevents 
>any traffic from being forwarded. Default: mbs=10ms of traffic or 64KB
>if 
>PIR=max; cbs=10ms of traffic or 64KB if CIR=max"
>
>So the default setting is that they have a 10ms buffer and if a packet
>is 
>trying to be inserted into this buffer and it's 10ms full, then that 
>packet will instead be dropped.
>
>They claimed most of their customers (ISPs) just went with this setting
>
>and didn't change it.
>
>Do we have a way to test this kind of setting from the outside, for 
>instance by sending a large chunk of data at wirespeed and then
>checking 
>the characteristics of the buffering/drop for this burst of packets at 
>receive side?
>
>-- 
>Mikael Abrahamssonemail: swm...@swm.pp.se

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