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October 2014
November 2014

2014-10-22 »

You have not truly experienced bufferbloat until you have a 1 Mbps link to the Internet and you try to do a hangout while your company-encrufted Macbook tries to upload and download boatloads of undefined probably-auditing-related junk in the background.  Yay 30 second ping times!

To add insult to injury, Xcode comes with a tool called "Network Link Conditioner."  It nominally allows you to simulate various poor-quality links for testing your programs.  One of the options is to set a maximum upload/download speed, so I thought, hey!  Perfect!  I'll set a limit lower than the Internet link and dodge the bufferbloat, as I've previously done using tc on Linux.

Well, the joke's on me.  I don't know what Network Link Conditioner does, but the end result is it can take a good link and make it act like it has a ton of ... bufferbloat.  Sigh.  I guess the good news is that's exactly what you should be testing your apps against since that's what people have.  But no, it's not really what I was going for.

I think I should start carrying around a Linux-based wifi repeater box wherever I go.  It'll have rate limiting features built in and I'll just pipe all my traffic through that.

I'm CEO at Tailscale, where we make network problems disappear.

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