nanog mailing list archives

Re: China’s Slow Transnational Network


From: Tom Beecher <beecher () beecher cc>
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2020 15:33:05 -0500

Poor network performance between the Chinese networks and the rest of the
world is not a bug ; it's an intentional feature. The government of China
has constructed these multiple systems to both control what information is
or is not received by their citizens, but also to ensure that domestic
internet companies and services face little to no competition from the
outside world.

As we've unfortunately seen domestically as well, it's a lot easier to
convince people to use YOUR service if performance to the other services
kinda sucks. This is the exact same thing, just at a national scale.


On Mon, Mar 2, 2020 at 3:06 PM Jeff Shultz <jeffshultz () sctcweb com> wrote:


On Mon, Mar 2, 2020 at 11:46 AM Pengxiong Zhu <pzhu011 () ucr edu> wrote:

Those are good insights. Our first guess is censorship too, and we
discussed the possibilities of censorship side effects in Section 5.1
*Censorship*.

My guess is that it’s all the DDoS traffic coming from China saturating
the links.


In fact, Great Canon (GC) [55] is such an in-path system. But it is known
for intercepting a subset of traffic (based on protocol type) only. What’s
more, GC has been activated only twice in history (the last one in 2015
[55]). However, it might be the case that the in-path capability is
re-purposed to perform general traffic throttling. If that is the case,
they have done a good job because the throttling resembles natural
congestion from the loss rate and latency point of view. The asymmetric
performance between downstream and upstream traffic can be explained by the
natural imbalance of transnational traffic (where the upstream traffic from
China to outside is not significant enough to throttle).

Maybe... I dunno.... get rid of the Great Firewall of China?


What do you mean? Do you mean the slow traffic is to bypass the GFW or
the slow traffic is caused by GFW?


You've pretty much determined there is nothing we can do on this side of
the Chinese mainland to improve throughput - the bottlenecks are all inside
China.

As you noted, ~35% of the bottlenecks were GFW related.  I wonder how many
retransmissions that results in, slowing everything down that much further?
Until the mainland Chinese Government allows the free passage of
information, there will be bottlenecks. And bottlenecks have a habit of
affecting traffic flows outside of their own area.

I doubt that any one thing is the source of the entire problem. But add
them all together....

--
Jeff Shultz


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