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Yep, the response they received was incredibly condescending. The follow-up from Cloudflare remained polite and added a lot more data, and was ignored. It's a

Yep, the response they received was incredibly condescending. The follow-up from Cloudflare remained polite and added a lot more data, and was ignored. It's a shame because I've seen this condescending attitude quite frequently in the crypto open source community, and am not really sure how it arises. At least in this case it seems to have had the good outcome of motivating Cloudflare to dig in deeper and solve the problem by themselves.

dr_zoidberg 7y ago
I'd say it comes from sitting at an ivory tower and giving 0 ducks about who you're talking to. In this case, the person/team asking was capable enough to go on their own, dig, test, change, and find a fix. It could've probably been easier for them if given proper directions. OTOH, perhaps those that answered from atop the tower had little idea of the mechanisms that the author(s?) dug out and changed. So double shame on them, for being condescending and not knowing. And it also falls on ourselves to be mindful of this behaviour, that can creep up on us without knowing. We sometimes think our time is super valuable and we don't have to spend it on some "newbie question" or this guy who doesn't understand. The past year I've been mentoring grad students in the lab I work at, and found myself once or twice going this route. I luckily caught it early, took a deep breath and gave them the time and explanations they needed. In the end I got a few nice surprises out of two amazing students, who were seeing a bit beyond what was evident.
- belorn 7y ago
  I see many large project addressing this issue by not having a public list where you can talk directly to the developers. Instead there is user lists which public relation managers maintain and where the expected result from the original mail would either be no response or a polite and nicely written one about testing the user configuration options that they had already tested. That way the developer would not need to respond unless the user has shown enough proof of work to demonstrate to the public relation managers that the issue should be forwarded to a developer, in which case the answer the developer would reply with would be under the assumption that the person/team asking is capable enough to use the directions to dig, test, change, and create a patch which then later might be added to the project.
megous 7y ago
Full response: https://www.spinics.net/lists/dm-crypt/msg07517.html https://www.spinics.net/lists/dm-crypt/msg07517.html From the PoV of the person who responded they didn't provide any relevant information that would indicate what platform they run, or what speed they expect, or why they think 800MiB/s seems slow to them. On many platforms this would be a pretty good result. At first look, it looks like they expected the speed of unencrypted storage, because that's what they tried to compare against. So the response seems reasonable at first glance to me. They got the answer to their main question. (which they omitted from their blog article)
- gravitas 7y ago
  I disagree with your assessment. > If the numbers disturb you, then this is from lack of understanding on your side. This is arrogance on the part of the person replying that hand-waved away their problem "you just don't understand" when in fact, they (Cloudflare) do/did understand. They then went on to prove that it was due to queuing within the kernel, not the hardware as commented by this person in their flippant reply.
  - megous 7y ago
    Cloudflare did not understand at the time. Anyway, I'm not questioning that the reply was not very helpful, I just don't see it as unreasonable. I liked the technical parts of the CF writeup overall.
    - marcinzm 7y ago
      >Cloudflare did not understand at the time And neither did the people who responded to them it seems.
    - why_only_15 7y ago
      The next line after that is "You are probably unaware that encryption is a heavy-weight operation". If you're posting to the dm-crypt mailing list about encryption performance, you're probably very aware that encryption is a heavy-weight operation.
_jal 7y ago
Honestly, read the original message and consider how you would have replied. They showed work in a vacuum - demonstrated that dm-crypt has costs over raw device access (I would hope so!) on some unknown hardware, and then asks "does this look right to you?" Well, yeah, that looks like it looks elsewhere, and by the way, there's a built-in command that also would have told you this. People whine about technical mailing lists, I think because they don't get the context. Think of them as sort of like water coolers at an office that specializes in whatever the list is about. You get a short slice of expert attention in between doing whatever they actually have to get done. Throwing a bunch of data on the floor and saying "hey, is this expected?" is not going to work well. Seriously, what were they expecting?
- rrss 7y ago
  > Well, yeah, that looks like it looks elsewhere, and by the way, there's a built-in command that also would have told you this. It's entirely possible to say both these things in a much more constructive and less condescending tone than was used.
  - _jal 7y ago
    People are so very weirdly sensitive to these things when it is a big company that comes calling. Wonder why that is. Context matters. If you don't take the time to understand the context you're walking in to and don't follow local rules, don't be surprised if people are rude to you back. Not that I even think what they said was all that rude. Do you also think you can slide in to a gam3r chat and expect business etiquette?
    - manigandham 7y ago
      I don't think a crypto mailing list is the same as "gam3r" subreddit, but it wasn't that rude overall. It was the tone that they "dont understand" when in fact Cloudflare does understand crypto and performance very well, and went so far as to dive into kernel code and submit patches that fixed the problem that others didnt even realize existed. Even so I agree this isn't worth such a big discussion.

dr_zoidberg 7y ago

I'd say it comes from sitting at an ivory tower and giving 0 ducks about who you're talking to. In this case, the person/team asking was capable enough to go on their own, dig, test, change, and find a fix. It could've probably been easier for them if given proper directions. OTOH, perhaps those that answered from atop the tower had little idea of the mechanisms that the author(s?) dug out and changed. So double shame on them, for being condescending and not knowing. And it also falls on ourselves to be mindful of this behaviour, that can creep up on us without knowing. We sometimes think our time is super valuable and we don't have to spend it on some "newbie question" or this guy who doesn't understand. The past year I've been mentoring grad students in the lab I work at, and found myself once or twice going this route. I luckily caught it early, took a deep breath and gave them the time and explanations they needed. In the end I got a few nice surprises out of two amazing students, who were seeing a bit beyond what was evident.

belorn 7y ago
I see many large project addressing this issue by not having a public list where you can talk directly to the developers. Instead there is user lists which public relation managers maintain and where the expected result from the original mail would either be no response or a polite and nicely written one about testing the user configuration options that they had already tested. That way the developer would not need to respond unless the user has shown enough proof of work to demonstrate to the public relation managers that the issue should be forwarded to a developer, in which case the answer the developer would reply with would be under the assumption that the person/team asking is capable enough to use the directions to dig, test, change, and create a patch which then later might be added to the project.

megous 7y ago

Full response: https://www.spinics.net/lists/dm-crypt/msg07517.html https://www.spinics.net/lists/dm-crypt/msg07517.html From the PoV of the person who responded they didn't provide any relevant information that would indicate what platform they run, or what speed they expect, or why they think 800MiB/s seems slow to them. On many platforms this would be a pretty good result. At first look, it looks like they expected the speed of unencrypted storage, because that's what they tried to compare against. So the response seems reasonable at first glance to me. They got the answer to their main question. (which they omitted from their blog article)

gravitas 7y ago
I disagree with your assessment. > If the numbers disturb you, then this is from lack of understanding on your side. This is arrogance on the part of the person replying that hand-waved away their problem "you just don't understand" when in fact, they (Cloudflare) do/did understand. They then went on to prove that it was due to queuing within the kernel, not the hardware as commented by this person in their flippant reply.
- megous 7y ago
  Cloudflare did not understand at the time. Anyway, I'm not questioning that the reply was not very helpful, I just don't see it as unreasonable. I liked the technical parts of the CF writeup overall.
  - marcinzm 7y ago
    >Cloudflare did not understand at the time And neither did the people who responded to them it seems.
  - why_only_15 7y ago
    The next line after that is "You are probably unaware that encryption is a heavy-weight operation". If you're posting to the dm-crypt mailing list about encryption performance, you're probably very aware that encryption is a heavy-weight operation.

_jal 7y ago

Honestly, read the original message and consider how you would have replied. They showed work in a vacuum - demonstrated that dm-crypt has costs over raw device access (I would hope so!) on some unknown hardware, and then asks "does this look right to you?" Well, yeah, that looks like it looks elsewhere, and by the way, there's a built-in command that also would have told you this. People whine about technical mailing lists, I think because they don't get the context. Think of them as sort of like water coolers at an office that specializes in whatever the list is about. You get a short slice of expert attention in between doing whatever they actually have to get done. Throwing a bunch of data on the floor and saying "hey, is this expected?" is not going to work well. Seriously, what were they expecting?

rrss 7y ago
> Well, yeah, that looks like it looks elsewhere, and by the way, there's a built-in command that also would have told you this. It's entirely possible to say both these things in a much more constructive and less condescending tone than was used.
- _jal 7y ago
  People are so very weirdly sensitive to these things when it is a big company that comes calling. Wonder why that is. Context matters. If you don't take the time to understand the context you're walking in to and don't follow local rules, don't be surprised if people are rude to you back. Not that I even think what they said was all that rude. Do you also think you can slide in to a gam3r chat and expect business etiquette?
  - manigandham 7y ago
    I don't think a crypto mailing list is the same as "gam3r" subreddit, but it wasn't that rude overall. It was the tone that they "dont understand" when in fact Cloudflare does understand crypto and performance very well, and went so far as to dive into kernel code and submit patches that fixed the problem that others didnt even realize existed. Even so I agree this isn't worth such a big discussion.