FreeBSD How big are the buffers in FreeBSD drivers?

[Carpetsmoker]

http://www.leidinger.net/blog/2011/0...eebsd-drivers/

It is a set of articles he wrote over several months and is not finished writing as of this writing (if you are deeply interested in it go and read them, the most interesting ones are from December and January and the comments to the articles are also contributing to the big picture). Basically he is telling that a lot of network problems users at home (with ADSL/cable or WLAN) experience are because buffers in the network hard*ware or in operating systems are too big. He also proposes workarounds until this problem is attacked by OS vendors and equipment manufacturers.

Basically he is telling the network congestion algorithms can not do their work good, because the network buffers which are too big come into the way of their work (not reporting packet loss timely enough respec*tively try to not lose packets in situations where packet loss would be better because it would trigger action in the congestion algorithms).

Everyone seems to think that big buffers are good, but the truth is more subtle it would seem ...

Interesting read.