by ryao | 2025-08-17 18:32:54+00:00
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.