Designing accessible latency metrics Toke Høiland-Jørgensen 25th September 2013 1 / 6
Quantifying latency ▶ Bufferbloat is (getting) accepted in technical circles ▶ But mostly unknown to end-users ▶ Can be explained with some care ▶ But how to quantify? 2 / 6
What do we have now? ▶ The RRUL test ▶ Eight TCP streams to induce load ▶ Measure UDP and ICMP ping times ▶ Comparison using CDF plots . Example . 1.0 Ping (ms) - fq_codel qdisc Ping (ms) - sfq qdisc Ping (ms) - codel qdisc You could Ping (ms) - pfifo_fast qdisc be here 0.8 Cumulative probability 0.6 0.4 You are here 0.2 0.0 10 1 10 2 10 3 . ms 3 / 6
What to measure? ▶ Minimum unloaded latency ▶ To where? ISP, nearest exchange, major site(s), E2E? ▶ From where? User device(s), CPE equipment? ▶ Uni/bidirectional? ICMP, UDP, load a full website? ▶ Latency under (saturated) load ▶ Needs reliable method to induce load ▶ Really hitting ”worst case” probably hard ▶ And what about outliers? ▶ Sampling frequency ▶ The ratio between the two ▶ A ”load degradation factor”? ▶ Logarithmic, linear, normalised? 4 / 6
Communicating the metric ▶ What is important for the user to know? ▶ An absolute measurement (ms) or a relative one (score)? ▶ Are bigger numbers better? ▶ Roundtrips/second rather than milliseconds of latency? ▶ Should minimum latency and degradation be combined into one metric? How? 5 / 6
What can the metric be used for? . Goals (short term?) . ▶ Expose bufferbloat in the network ▶ Enable the consumer to influence latency/bandwidth tradeoff decisions ▶ Create incentives for improvement . ▶ User (self-)information (like speedtest.net) ▶ ISP comparison charts ▶ Regulation requirements (e.g. bounds) ▶ QoS definition in contracts etc. ▶ Benchmarking in systems engineering 6 / 6
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