I often hear people saying they have bad responsiveness / high latency on their high-speed internet connection. Even though they have a contract for 500 mbps+ service from their ISP, a speedtest shows high ping times when the link is loaded. The answer is well-known – install a router with SQM that knows how to
macOS Monterey ships with a tool that measures the responsiveness of your network connection. It saturates the network with traffic for 20 seconds, then measures the rate of short transactions to compute “Responses Per Minute.” Big numbers (above 2000) mean your network remains responsive when the network is heavily loaded. Small numbers (under 800 or
[From the Archives of Amusing Technology…] Back in the ’90s, Dave Fisher and I created NameD•tective, a Macintosh control panel that gave any Mac on the Dartmouth network a static DNS name. It used Name Binding Protocol to let someone create a DNS name based on their name plus their AppleTalk zone. The DNS name
Last month, Comcast released a paper Improving Latency with Active Queue Management (AQM) During COVID-19 that shows that their PIE AQM dramatically decreases lag/latency (by a factor of 10X — from 250 msec down to 15-30 msec.) From the paper (page 13): … As explained earlier, for two variants of XB6 cable modem gateway,
At a recent videoconference, I advocated strongly for a consumer-facing measurement of latency/responsiveness. I had not planned to speak, so I gave off-the-cuff comments. This is an organized explanation of my position. I offer these thoughts for consideration at the IAB Workshop “Measuring Network Quality for End-Users, 2021” – Rich Brown I hunger for a
The link below goes to the current Internet Draft for Responsiveness under Working Conditions. It is available at: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-cpaasch-ippm-responsiveness/
My friends frequently ask, “Why is my network so slow?” And often, the answer is “latency” or the screwy term, “Bufferbloat” – the “undesirable latency caused when a router buffers too much data.” But what the heck does that mean? A while back, I attempted a layman’s explanation of Bufferbloat. I compared it to a
A WireGuard VPN provides a fast, secure tunnel between endpoints. It uses public/private key pairs to encrypt the data. If you have several clients, you have to enter their public keys into your server. Keeping track of those keys gets to be a hassle, since ordinarily, the keys are essentially random numbers. I found a
A WireGuard VPN provides a fast, secure tunnel between endpoints. A macOS GUI client is available from the App Store It works great. But its documentation is minimal. Even though the required keywords (which you must type manually) are the same as other clients, the GUI doesn’t give a hint about whether it’s right until
We all have heard the perennial complaint, “the network is sooo slow.” A primary reason is the inelegantly-named bufferbloat – caused by a bad router that queues up too much data (“the router gets bloated because it buffers too many packets”). The good news is that a fix has been known for quite a while