[BBLISA] slow wan link

[Daniel Hagerty]

Daniel Feenberg <feenberg at nber.org> writes:

> I have difficulty reconciling these facts. If pings are fast and packets 
> are not dropped, why do users see problems? I can confirm things seem 
> slow. Is this the dreaded "buffer bloat" problem so recently hyped? Is 
> there anything I can do here to aleviate it while waiting for more 
> bandwidth?

    I agree, it doesn't quite add up.  Bufferbloat would show up with
slow ping, or other slow real time apps.  Try interactive ssh over the
suspect link and see what your fingers tell you about round trip times.

    It's possible that the link has a really snazzy queueing setup with
buffering issues within it.  The theory here would be that the ping
you're running is hitting a small queue, but the traffic your users
actually care about are all hitting an overfull one.

    I've solved problems like this in the past with clever queueing, but
it's not clear that this is your problem.