Subject: PSA pt 1: for better videoconferencing at home on slow links

From: Dave Taht <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2020 11:51:12 -0700

As y'all know, my principal concern regarding fixing bufferbloat
has mostly centered around making interactive traffic better, like dns,
voip, and videoconferencing, and not really on "making tcp go way fast".

Since yer all stuck at home now doing videoconferencing
every day, and I, at least, have seen terrible videoconference after
videoconference all month... particularly from those on LTE....

I would be curious to know who of the ietf contingent has done
things like check for bufferbloat on their home links and fix it?

dslreports.com has the best web based bufferbloat related test I know of.
If you could send along your score, and what, if anything
you've done to mitigate it, that would be great!

The dslreports report on bufferbloat worldwide can be had at:

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/results/bufferbloat?up=1

The data is biased in a couple ways in that we use that site a lot
to tune up our sqm implementations, and they throw out a lot of data
they consider to be "insane".

For more professional analyses, particularly at rates well above 200Mbit,
bufferbloat.net recommends the flent.org and irtt tools and "rrul" test,
in particular, and using your own servers as targets. There IS
a worldwide flent fleet up as viable low bandwidth targets, but...

if anyone has a spare 10Gbit server in their dc we could add in for
more testers and testing, please let me know offlist?

Some random recommendations for better videoconferencing at home:

* use wires! wifi and lte can really suck.

* get LOTS more bandwidth!

* Banish everyone else from the network while videoconferencing! Or...

-- 
Make Music, Not War

Dave Täht
CTO, TekLibre, LLC
http://www.teklibre.com
Tel: 1-831-435-0729

---

From: Michael Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2020 11:59:24 -0700

> things like check for bufferbloat on their home links and fix it?

I did both in response to a friend downloading a a multi-gig game on my 
home net and completely slagging the network. Hilarity ensued as I tried 
to figure out what was going on for about an hour. I haven't managed to 
actually reproduce exactly the way he did it, but from everything I've 
tried I've not been able to cause my connection to melt down like that 
again.

For this, I bought a new router and flashed it with openwrt. At first I 
didn't think it made any difference because I didn't realize that I 
needed actually enable it. Is there some reason it's not loaded and 
enabled by default?

Mike