4 ms·
If you set your router to limit bandwidth below that initial burst speed, to your actual connection speed, you'll get consistent fast speed. The burst mechanis
by kaetemi 3y ago
If you set your router to limit bandwidth below that initial burst speed, to your actual connection speed, you'll get consistent fast speed.
The burst mechanism of your provider possibly squeezes below your normal speed to compensate for the burst, but ends up confusing TCP flow.
Those burst and squeeze cycles can cause some undesirable bandwidth oscillations.
- lxgr 3y agoAny TCP congestion control algorithm worth its salt should be able to adapt to varying path capacity these days, especially given how common traffic shaping with bursting is in residential connections.
- kaetemi 3y agoYou can safely assume the bursting itself is badly implemented on shitty ISP modems and causes spikes of high packet loss and latency when it switches. Say you're bursting 1gbps on a connection with 100ms latency. That connection squeezes to 20mbps suddenly. In the best case in those 100ms that the sender cannot even react to the change, we receive 10mbytes. Those 10mbytes that now have to be throttled away either get dropped or end up in a buffer. Now you either have a 5 second backlog latency or massive packet loss for 100ms while this resolves. And things overcompensate. And worst case, you end up in a oscillation pattern, the throttle goes off, and you burst again. This happens and is measurable.