[ryao]

The problem of buffer bloat is one of many issues that affect internet users. When I visited China and pings to my VPN in the US jumped from 200ms to 30 seconds depending on the time of day, bufferbloat was severely affecting me. That could only be described as bufferbloat, since the packets were suffering from store and forward overhead to an excessive degree and my pings were able to measure it across times of day.

Historically and likely still in the present day (but not in my household as we use AQM now), whenever one person in a household does a large download, internet latencies shoot up for everyone in the household, which is also bufferbloat. Having to wait hundreds of ms per round trip brings us back to the 56k dialup days and the performance impact on interactive traffic is horrific. It is enough to make VoIP unusable. As others have told you, there can be other issues at the same time, but bufferbloat makes the issues worse. I cannot speak for others on the extent to which they are afflicted by buffer bloat, but adopting AQM had a night and day difference in performance of the internet connection in my house, since I often do big data transfers that previously would slow down basic web browsing for everyone in my house, myself included.

As for your conjecture that extant problems are visible in recent journal publications, journals have a selection bias. The idea that a problem’s existence is indicated by the degree to which people are publishing papers on it in journals is fallacious since the papers need to not just provide something new, but also be interesting to those running the journal (i.e. make them think that the papers would elevate the status if their journal and help them get increased readership, provided that they are not a junk journal that will publish literally anything). On top of that, the work needs to be funded. Bufferbloat, which is largely considered a solved problem and which predominantly affects the less affluent these days, is not something that will get much attention in journals since nobody in academia seeks funding for something that they do not think they can improve or publish.

Finally, I did not use any ad hominem remarks toward you, as my remarks had focused entirely on what you wrote. I did write that any further replies would likely be done to get you to keep talking so I can play my old game of “figure out what is wrong with someone posting bizarre things on the internet”. About 30% of the population is mentally ill and thus when someone is posting bizarre things online, it is often the result of mental illness. Figuring out which mental illness is often the only reason responding to bizarre posts is worthwhile (as it is both an intellectual challenge and a public service). This contradicts your remarks suggesting that there is no point to my replies, to use my words rather than yours. It is not an ad hominem remark to say that I am likely to do this analysis. Posting the results of the analysis would be, but it would be grounded in fact and would likely be done to suggest professional help for X condition, if my amateur analysis identifies a condition that could benefit from professional help. Honestly, I think the world would be a better place if more people who studied psychology (even 1 class like I did) played armchair psychologist when others persist in a pattern of bizarre remarks and refer those who need professional help to trained professionals.

[commandersaki]

When I visited China and pings to my VPN in the US jumped from 200ms to 30 seconds depending on the time of day, bufferbloat was severely affecting me. That could only be described as bufferbloat, since the packets were suffering from store and forward overhead to an excessive degree and my pings were able to measure it across times of day.

I think you suffer from tunnel vision here, particularly if you ascribe the issue to your ISP which would have magnitudes more capacity than subscriber links, even if oversubscribed. For Bufferbloat to be an issue in that regard they'd have to be a choke point, in which case there's actual seriously problems at that point. I'd expect being China there's a lot more going on anyway with GFW and poor routing.

Bufferbloat, which is largely considered a solved problem and which predominantly affects the less affluent these days, is not something that will get much attention in journals since nobody in academia seeks funding for something that they do not think they can improve or publish.

I feel this is the point you missed when having a conniption; I didn't say bufferbloat didn't exist, I said it was overhyped. I would like you to reflect on these two views and see how they differ significantly, as it clearly went over your head on your crusade to crucify me.

About 30% of the population is mentally ill and thus when someone is posting bizarre things online, it is often the result of mental illness. Figuring out which mental illness is often the only reason responding to bizarre posts is worthwhile

Sure happy to say I suffer mental illness. I have been morbid less than 0.5% of the time in the last 15 years, otherwise it is in remission. What's actually bizarre is thinking there is one type of mental illness that makes people somehow unhinged or can't carry a debate because you simply do not like what they say, it's clear that your one psychology class which you use as a crutch to spout nonsense shows you're clearly out of depth here, you should seriously stop; it's also abundantly clear you use it as a guise to gatekeep and to condescend; if you can't debate or argue in good faith, I would put forth the advice you keep trying to palm off - do not continue posting, disengage.

But if I didn't sway you with above, stop and at least read the HN guidelines; this isn't the other social media platforms you're used to.

[ryao]

I do not think mental illness is the cause of people posting wrong remarks, but when they post remarks that strike me as particularly bizarre, as yours have here, I think consideration of mental illness itself is worthwhile, productive and interesting. I have been very kind from the start, when I informed you that you were making yourself look bad. Being curious about what causes you to persist in such behavior is also a form of kindness, especially when such curiosity leads to a recommendation of professional help, although those who need help are not always willing to get it.

I will point out that you were not interested in debating in good faith, as your sole purpose is to make the point that people should treat buffer bloat as a theoretical issue that does not actually affect people, with the explanation for every incident of buffer bloat always being something else. Everything you wrote has been consistent with that. You even applied a pattern of overanalysis to the discussion that can be used to claim the contrary to anything. Your apparent need to deny the existence of a well known issue is bizarre. You would be much happier right now if you had dropped the subject.

By the way, peering links between the greater China area and the rest of the world are notoriously bad due to limited capacity. China in particular has three tier 1 networks that all refuse to upgrade peering links between each other in a timely manner, and the peering links between them and the rest of the world are often just as bad as the peering links inside of China. In order to get a decent connection there in 2016, I had to forcibly do my own routing through VMs in data centers in Shanghai, Tokyo and others to control the links used, after much trial and error, yet there were still periods where the links were horrendous and surprisingly, the issue was not always exclusive to China according to my testing between VMs on various data centers. I was visiting family for a month, yet needed a decent connection to work remotely, so I spent an entire week non-stop studying the connectivity and experimenting with ways of improving my VPN connectivity. I also had proof that the GFW was not where problems occurred, since my tcpdump pcap files taken at VMs in Shanghai and Tokyo showed the packets traversing the GFW. I also had reproduced similar performance issues using VMs in other countries, such as Japan and Singapore, where there is no GFW, as part of attempts to identify paths over which I could forcibly route my traffic via iptables rules. It is obvious to me that you will continue to deny bufferbloat was a problem and instead blame something else, yet as others have already explained to you, bufferbloat makes problems worse. After a delay of a few hundred ms, my VoIP session did not care if the packets were delivered or not, since at that point, the packets were useless, yet enormous buffers would delay them and other traffic well past a sane expiry instead of dropping it, to the detriment of all trying to use the peering links.

[commandersaki]

I do not think mental illness is the cause of people posting wrong remarks, but when remarks strike me as particularly bizarre, as yours have here, I think consideration of mental illness itself is worthwhile, productive and interesting. I have been very kind from the start, when I informed you that you were making yourself look bad. Being curious about what causes you to persist in such behavior is also a form of kindness, especially when it leads to a recommendation of professional help, although those who need help are not always willing to get it.

It has nothing to do with the topic, doesn't add substantive discussion to the topic? The bizarre part is you keep bringing up mental illness without actually specifying one. You should just admit to yourself that you use it to skirt the rules, condescend and gatekeep. Please read the HN guidelines and keep that kind of rhetoric to other social platform mediums where that is condoned.

I should point out that you were not interested in debating in good faith, as your sole purpose is to make the point that people should treat buffer bloat as a theoretical issue that does not actually affect people

I've been debating in good faith, but when you repeatedly misinterpret what I'm saying and continue to argue for an imagined argument, I give up.

I should point out that you were not interested in debating in good faith, as your sole purpose is to make the point that people should treat buffer bloat as a theoretical issue that does not actually affect people, with the explanation for every incident of buffer bloat always being something else as if buffer bloat were not a factor. You were applying a pattern of overanalysis to the discussion that can be used to claim the contrary to anything. I really do not understand your apparent need to deny the existence of a well known issue, but it is bizarre in a bad way. You would be much happier right now if you had dropped the subject.

I'm actually fine; I just don't take well to pointless tangents, ad hominems, and curmudgeon behaviour which is really all your doing. It took you several posts to get to the content of what I was asking. As for overanalysis; is it though? A lot of people do not know how to analyse a problem in the first place, ignore variables, and jump to conclusions due to confirmation bias. You're taking this personally as you think I'm underestimating your ability to diagnose the problem, but that's not what I'm getting at and is central to my argument, there is a variety of problems on the Internet and it is hard to actually distill and get an accurate diagnosis. Experiencing latency or jitter is a tale old as time; and I think the overarching argument I've been pointed out is that we've improved Internet infrastructure for the most part that bufferbloat just isn't relevant (as it is hard to manifest and trigger), yet still gets hyped as an issue. You even conceded this point earlier.

It is obvious to me that you will deny bufferbloat was a problem and instead blame the peering links

I didn't deny it, I just said that you don't have enough information to argue its case, especially with the lofty argument that it is occurring at the ISP as opposed to your CPE. Let alone your ISP in China which immediately raises red flags with all the other issues that are at play.

Anyways, I'm kind of done, you're imagining a villain you must slay, resorted to gatekeeping, ad hominems, pointless tangents, etc. I'll leave you to it.

[ryao]

Multiple people have tried to explain buffer bloat to you and you have repeatedly denied it affects people in reality. The discussion with you has been little different from people saying that a number of things are explained by the Earth being round only to be told, by you in this analogy, that we have failed to consider many other things and thus cannot really know that the earth is round.

This is the most bizarre choice of “hill to die on” that I have ever seen.