Top all-time · #2071
Jim Gettys
Personal blog · gettys.wordpress.comsystemsprogramming
Jim Gettys writes jg's Ramblings, a personal blog at gettys.wordpress.com about systems and programming. Since 2008, 36 different Hacker News readers have linked it 48 times, most often “The Blind Men and the Elephant”. The last post was in 2020, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Jim Gettys' blog for explanations of bufferbloat and network latency, and for his posts on X11 and early Linux graphics history. Commenters point to it as a starting point on the topic.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Called "fantastic" and "a great blog"; latest bufferbloat post praised for exhaustive detail; a "best single explanation" of the topic; a series recommended for
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Jim Gettys' ramblings on random topics, and occasional rants.
Most-linked posts?
- The Blind Men and the Elephant5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-02-12
- The criminal mastermind: bufferbloat3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-01-10
- Bufferbloat: buffer sizing in networks2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-12-14
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-09-19
- Fundamental Progress Solving Bufferbloat2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-05-08
- The Next Nightmare is Coming2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-05-16
- Whose house is of glasse, must not throw stones at another2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-12-07
- /2010/12/13/mitigations-and-solutions-of-bufferbloat-in-home-routers-and-operating-systems/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-12-14
What Hacker News says?
https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/make-wifi-fast/wiki/ and jim gettys blog https://gettys.wordpress.com/ are good places to start
Comment linking /
on “Wireless Is a Trap”Submitted Mythology About Security as a story · 144 points
HN discussion> The problem isn't that your videoconferencing goes from 1080p to 360p -- it's that it stutters and stops working for seconds at a time, so students completely miss content, and introduces a lag Bufferbloat. Ideally, at least for TCP applications, with perfect network congestion control, reduced bandwidth due to streaming should only degrade data rate, but never massively increase the latency. A slight increase is…
Comment linking /2018/02/11/the-blind-men-and-the-elephant/
on “YouTube to limit default video quality around the world for a month”Submitted Whose house is of glasse, must not throw stones at another as a story · 47 points
HN discussionYes, I agree: Cairo is "really good stuff" as Jim Gettys so modestly puts it! It's one of the best things to come out of X-Windows and the original Xr extension. ("The name Cairo derives from the original name Xr, interpreted as the Greek letters chi and rho.") Finally (and for a long time now) it's an independent library, no longer tied into the X server and Xr extension, and there are a lot of wrappers for it, bro…
Comment linking /2010/12/03/introducing-the-criminal-mastermind-bufferbloat/
on “Ancient X11 scaling technology”Submitted The Internet is Broken, and How to Fix It as a story · 42 points
HN discussionThe linked Gettys article is fantastic too: https://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/red-in-a-different-l... VJ is at PARC now. The old VJ LBL papers are still collected at ICSI/ICIR (Vern Paxson is still there!): http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/pubs/browse.pl?groupid=... There used to be some attention paid to deliberate evasion of congestion avoidance (Stefan Savage did a paper on it), the idea being that a ma…
Comment linking /2010/12/17/red-in-a-different-light/
on “The lost Van Jacobson paper that could save the Internet ”Submitted Apple Patents Portrait-Landscape Flipping: the patent system is broken as a story · 28 points
HN discussionThat's good basics, but it's all fixed now. Jim's latest blog post goes into exausting detail. https://gettys.wordpress.com/category/bufferbloat/
Comment linking /category/bufferbloat/
on “What Can I Do About Bufferbloat?”Submitted The Blind Men and the Elephant as a story · 9 points
HN discussionHere's an interesting interview [1] [2] with Jim "Internet Plumber" Gettys [3], one of the original designers of X [4], and editor of the HTTP/1.1 specification. He talks about his work on the OLPC project, X memory usage, Linux and other stuff. He also has a great blog [5], and has been investigating the effect of bufferbloat on network performance [6] [7]. [1] Part 1: https://lwn.net/Articles/188060/ [2] Part 2: h…
Comment linking /
on “The Linux graphics stack from X to Wayland (2011)”Submitted The Next Nightmare is Coming as a story · 7 points
HN discussionChoppy network on WiFi? Read up on Bufferbloat: https://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/03/introducing-the-crim... http://www.bufferbloat.net/
Comment linking /2010/12/03/introducing-the-criminal-mastermind-bufferbloat/
on “The Linux graphics stack from X to Wayland”Submitted Don't blame BitTorrent. Blame bufferbloat instead. as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI think you're missing the same thing the author missed in the Jim Gettys' article. You cannot fix the situation easily in every situation if the ISP is not behaving correctly, contrary to what the post says. He was able to fix this specific scenario, because he was the bottleneck (he was generating more traffic / accepting promise of delivery) in this case. The original series of articles (I really recommend readin…
Comment linking /2010/12/13/mitigations-and-solutions-of-bufferbloat-in-home-routers-and-operating-systems/
on “Bufferbloat”Submitted Bufferbloat demonstration videos as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThis article is part of a series, which examine performance problems in high-speed internet connections. Unfortunately, in addition to being split over several pages, it is written in one of the most rambling and verbose styles I've ever seen. The best single explanation is found not in the submitted link, but in < http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/03/introducing-the-crimi... > My background in networking isn't st…
Comment linking /2010/12/13/mitigations-and-solutions-of-bufferbloat-in-home-routers-and-operating-systems/
on “Whose house is of glasse, must not throw stones at another”Submitted It's time to turn on Random Early Detection congestion control in the Internet as a story · 5 points
HN discussionNormally, TCP waits for the buffer to exceed the maximum segment size before sending any data. This creates serious delays when the two sides of the connection are exchanging short messages and need to receive the response before continuing. For example, the login sequence at the beginning of a telnet session begins with the short message "Login", and the session cannot make any progress until these five characters…
Comment linking /2010/12/03/introducing-the-criminal-mastermind-bufferbloat/
on “Whose house is of glasse, must not throw stones at another”Submitted An amazing tale of broadband latency and congestion as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThis is a new algorithm to fight bufferbloat by Kathleen Nichols and Van Jacobson. It has no tunables, and is able to adapt to bandwidth changes of two orders on magnitude, making it suitable for radio links (3G, WiFi). Patches for the CeroWrt home router are being tested: https://gettys.wordpress.com/2012/05/08/fundamental-progress... Via https://lwn.net/Articles/496250/
Comment linking /2012/05/08/fundamental-progress-solving-bufferbloat/
on “CoDel: wireless-friendly adaptive queue management”- xd · 2012-03-01
Submitted Bufferbloat as a story · 4 points
HN discussion Submitted Bufferbloat: buffer sizing in networks as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Traditional AQM is not enough as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fundamental Progress Solving Bufferbloat as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Blind Men and the Elephant as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Internet is Broken, and How to Fix It as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Milestone Reached: CoDel is in Linux as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fundamental Progress Solving Bufferbloat as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Bufferbloat demonstration videos as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
