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.
Why would you follow me on twitter? Use RSS.