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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

Programmer / software engineer Paul Smith has written a blog post about how to fix buffer bloat on your home network with OpenBSD 6.2 or newer [pauladamsmith.com]. He goes into how to diagnose and solve unnecessary latencies if encountered when using OpenBSD-based home routers. Overly filled buffers can be caused by misprioritization of packets, which is a solvable problem once the reasons are identified.

The reason for this is a phenomenom called "bufferbloat". I'm not going to explain it in detail, there are plenty of good resources to read about it, including the eponymous Bufferbloat.net. Bufferbloat is the result of complex interactions between the software and hardware systems routing traffic around on the Internet. It causes higher latency in networks, even ones with plenty of bandwidth. In a nutshell, software queues in our routers are not letting certain packets through fast enough to ensure that things feel interactive and responsive. Pings, TCP ACKs, SSH connections, are all being held up behind a long line of packets that may not need to be delivered with the same urgency. There's enough bandwidth to process the queue, the trick is to do it more quickly and more fairly.

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