Jim’s 8-minute video demonstrates latency in his home connection with and without a competing file upload. As he says, it is a fantastic, tangible way to see this problem and to realize that it’s already affecting you on a daily basis. The coolest part of the video is when he intentionally throttles his broadband router to 70% bandwidth and he shows a HUGE improvement in perceived performance.
Originally shared by Jim Gettys
I finally published the #bufferbloat demonstration videos I’ve been working on. I expect it will help make the problem more concrete to those of you who have heard of bufferbloat, and wondered what it does. You can find them in my blog.
Glad you like it. What is surprising is that this demo is done on a broadband connection of typical upstream bloat, and the effect is so dramatic.
To be precise, the first demo is of a home connection with essentially the same characteristics as to when I first ran into bufferbloat and is pretty typical of what’s out there. The second demo uses my current home connection, which, since it is 50Mbps, means that the downstream bottleneck has been moved firmly into the home router, so that I can demonstrate the problems there (which otherwise might be moving back and forth between the broadband and home router on a second by second basis).
Yep, agreed. Keep up the good work, Jim. Your efforts to publicize this problem are sure to make a tangible improvement for billions of people.
I certainly hope so. At least I’m pretty sure later this year the cable industry will be able to deploy improvements. But it’s like draining a world-wide swamp…
I heard and thought a lot about this problem during my grad school days about ten years ago. I had moved on to other topics and had no idea about the prevailing blasé attitude toward AQM. I am glad to see attention is coming back around again. Nice article in January CACM on the same topic, by the way. http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/1/144810-bufferbloat/fulltext
Thanks. I sweat some blood on it.
There’s a script out there called wondershaper which I used to use for this on a home LAN. Effects like this can be more noticeable in high latency corners of the internet like NZ!