Comment 5 for bug 940541

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Emilio Wuerges (wuerges) wrote :

Here is a little big introduction from the source itself:
http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/Introduction

The bufferbloat problem arises from the fact that the delay in a TCP network under congestion is exponential to the size of the buffers. For that, in 1993 RED was devised: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_early_detection
It tries to keep the size of the buffers small by randomly (and thus fairly) dropping packages .

The problem is that people didn't like to have their packages dropped and manufactures built routers and network cards with huge buffers and over time each layer of abstraction on the network added its own buffer. So today we have tons of buffers that we aren't even aware of.

This "fix" I sent mitigates the problem of buffer bloat by reducing the max size of the linux buffer. It does nothing about the underlying buffers on the hardware but simple testing shows that it reduces the delay in a local area network by a lot.