undefined | Better HN

0 pointsprirun2y ago0 comments

I had a flaky internet connection for a while, where it would have a few seconds of dropout maybe every hour. It was annoying as hell, especially for remote ssh connections. It turned out to be a bad cable from my house to the Spectrum box, which they did fix after 3 visits.

Doing the math, this is 75/(24*3600) = .00086, or availability of 99.914%, which sounds great, but in reality it's garbage.

Instead of p99, which wouldn't tell us anything really, I'd suggest something like average and total packet loss on a continuous 1-second ping by month for the last year, or even by day for non-zero days. Then if a service has dropout problems it will be easy to spot.

0 comments

1 comments · 1 top-level

dtaht2y ago

I am a big believer in passive monitoring (see libreqos).

Measuring packet loss is a PITA because it is the absence of information. While you can infer it from protocols like TCP, QUIC and VOIP protocols make loss only visible to the end-points.

A request response protocol like ping is a lousy metric for measuring voice quality. See irtt. Sending a VOIP-like flow in both directions, one small packet every 20ms, would be vastly better than ping, except there is an energy cost to it.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse