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by neilalexander 957 days ago
I would think that more intelligent packet scheduling (like fair queuing) is also playing a significant role these days, with routers on the path being empowered to drop packets from one flow in order to service another. That helps to bully most TCP congestion control algorithms into throttling back to a fairer pace, as they'll just end up with lots of retries otherwise.
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At the edge, if Brutal comes up against FQ-Codel or Cake in your (recent) Linux router, then if it causes congestion it should shoot itself in the foot, and other traffic shouldn't see too much adverse impact. When Brutal is limited to its fair share and sees loss, it will likely increase, get more loss, and only cause itself pain. Unfortunately Cake isn't all that widespread yet in home routers.

In large routers at ISPs, the best tool that is likely to be available is WFQ, with a limited number of hash buckets available. Likely WFQ will bundle many other flows together in the same bucket with a Brutal flow, so Brutal will still cause collareral damage if it encounters congestion.

We are making significant progress with CAKE & fq_codel in the WISP & and fiber markets as a middlebox. See Preseem, Bequant, and LibreQos.io. Still best to get these native on the CPE as Mikrotik and many many others have one.

I wonder how well these would work on the GFW?