The Domain Name System replaced hosts.txt as the way hostname to IP resolution was done in 1982. The Internet in the 1980s was a very different place. There are even a few of the big speed test sites that now offer bufferbloat tests. If your latency under load goes through the roof, you likely have bufferbloat. Run a speed test, and run a ping test while your connection is being saturated. That’s bufferbloat, and it’s actually really easy to do a simple test to detect it. When someone else is streaming a movie, or a machine is pushing a backup up to a remote server, it all falls apart. Let it run for a hundred packets, and essentially no packet loss. You know how to use a command line, so you try a ping test. What if you have a non-obvious problem? Sites load, but just a little slower than it seems like they used to. It’s pretty easy to spot a broken connection, even if finding and fixing it isn’t so trivial. Your VoIP calls get cut off, or have drop-outs. And if something really goes wrong, you know it right away. Each of those hops represents another place for things to go wrong. It’s amazing that the whole thing works at all, really. Or maybe through that convoluted chain of devices in reverse, to arrive at another desktop. When your computer sends a TCP/IP packet to another host on the Internet, that packet routes through your computer, through the network card, through a switch, through your router, through an ISP modem, through a couple ISP routers, and then finally through some very large routers on its way to the datacenter. Many programmers and engineers, like Vint Cerf, Dave Taht, Jim Gettys, and many more have cracked this nut for our collective benefit. Oh, and a huge shout-out to all the folks working on this problem. What it is, how to test for it, and finally what you can do about it. OK, there’s probably several diseases, but today we’re talking about bufferbloat. There’s a dreaded disease that’s plagued Internet Service Providers for years.
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