this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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144
Increase your Linux Server Internet Speed with TCP BBR Congestion-Control (www.cyberciti.biz)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
26 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I recently found this on Reddit while looking into why jellyfin is effected so much by latency. I found that this worked and thought I would share it because it is generally applicable, takes five minutes to setup, and helps a lot with bandwidth on higher latency connections. I admit I am not sure of the technical stuff behind this, so if anyone would like to chime in that would be much appreciated.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Cool! This seems like an good write up on it

https://atoonk.medium.com/tcp-bbr-exploring-tcp-congestion-control-84c9c11dc3a9

Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR) is a TCP congestion control algorithm developed at Google in 2016. Up until recently, the Internet has primarily used loss-based congestion control, relying only on indications of lost packets as the signal to slow down the sending rate. This worked decently well, but the networks have changed. We have much more bandwidth than ever before; The Internet is generally more reliable now, and we see new things such as bufferbloat that impact latency. BBR tackles this with a ground-up rewrite of congestion control, and it uses latency, instead of lost packets as a primary factor to determine the sending rate.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Interesting. I'd be interested in hearing other people's experience with this. Is this BBR stuff enabled by default on any distros?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago (1 children)

According to multiple debian based and ubuntu based and Arch I use. No. Not default. Cubic still is.

My experience was that some days ago I was trying to make my UDP faster, but turned out found out about BBR - for TCP. Well, lucky me - currently some country away from home for family reason. Plex generally takes 40-80s to start a movie/episode for me. And measly about 10s max buffer available - and this is on a 3-5Mbps show.

After BBR (note I have to apply on Proxmox host, my container are unprivileged and can't set this themselves), I got 8-30s max to start a show/movie. And now comfortably sit between some good minutes on buffer. 15-20Mbps quality now playable.

To me personally it was black magic, and I was tossing it in just 2 days ago too

Ask more if question

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If this is black magic, will I be subject to some sort of witch trial in the near future?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

This is the Internet. No witch trial just witch burning.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

I don't know if it is, but it is really as simple as adding to lines to a config file and restarting a service.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

For example unraid (does that count as a distro?) has it enabled by default

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Can’t I just download more gigabits?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Download more bandwidth

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago

Download more bandwidth

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Are there any downsides to this? Why isn't it default if it is so drastically better?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_congestion_control#TCP_BBR

List some issues, but only earlier version, not BBR3

BBR1:

researchers like Geoff Huston and Hock, Bless and Zitterbart found it unfair to other streams and not scalable.

Hock et al. also found "some severe inherent issues such as increased queuing delays, unfairness, and massive packet loss" in the BBR implementation of Linux 4.9.

Soheil Abbasloo et al. (authors of C2TCP) show that BBRv1 doesn't perform well in dynamic environments such as cellular networks.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I believe it will result in like 10% additional overhead, which may be bad on metered connections, but I am not aware of any situation that results in decreased performance. I don't really know much about this so if anyone would like to correct me, please do.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I skimmed through it and have no idea what BBR stands for.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

It's an algorithm for determining how fast to upload packets. This article just talks about how to enable it.

Here's the Wikipedia section about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_congestion_control#TCP_BBR

The gist is that instead of only throttling upload rate based on packet loss, BBR constantly measures roundtrip delay (ping) to determine how much bandwidth is available.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Thank you! I hate unexplained acronyms

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It is explained in the article though...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Ahh yes, the first time it is defined is in the conclusion after being used 25 times previously in the article.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Cool writeup. I remember implementing BBR many years ago when I was trying to bypass the Great Firewall for an extended stay. Helped deal greatly with the huge congestion on Chinanet backbone at the time, but it's less of an issue these days now that foreigners can use CN2.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Sorry, what is CN2?

If it's any solution CCP provides, I wouldn't trust it anyway

The great firewall situation was always interesting, because if you would use a roaming Sim, then you will be able to access anything

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

The great firewall situation was always interesting, because if you would use a roaming Sim, then you will be able to access anything

Roaming SIMs work because the APN sets a network routing path outside of China.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Thx mate

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I did this and I don't notice a difference

[–] [email protected] -3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
IP Internet Protocol
Plex Brand of media server package
TCP Transmission Control Protocol, most often over IP
UDP User Datagram Protocol, for real-time communications

[Thread #681 for this sub, first seen 15th Apr 2024, 22:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

You didn't catch BBR bot :-)