Bufferbloat: Sacrificing Latency for Throughput

“And, like concrete roads, our solution to the problem has been
fairly singular in its approach: we add more lanes in the form of
bandwidth. Got a slow network? Add more pipe, that’ll take care of
the problem, right?

“One network engineer says otherwise. Bandwidth is only part of
the solution, according to Jim Gettys, one of the creators of the X
Window system: Network latency is the other half of the solution.
And, Gettys is saying, because we have thrown so much technology at
improving throughput and bandwidth for the sake of an exploding
rate of growth of consumer Internet traffic, we have overridden the
basic congestion avoidance protocols that could reduce latency and
prevent Internet traffic jams in the first place.

“Gettys has coined the term for this problem: bufferbloat.”

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