Glossary · bufferbloat
Bufferbloat
Excessive latency when network buffers fill under load — the cause of lag spikes during downloads.
Most ISP routers ship with deep, badly-managed queues. A single user starting a download can fill them, adding 100–500 ms of buffering delay to every other packet — your video calls stutter, your game pings spike. Modern queue-management algorithms (fq_codel, CAKE) keep latency low under load. Bufferbloat is measured as the rise in ping between idle and saturated.
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