If a little salt makes food taste better, then a lot must make it taste great, right? This logic is often applied in the digital domain, too. (My pet peeve is that TV shows and DVDs keep getting darker and darker.) In a similar vein, networks used to buffer a little data, but these buffers have been getting larger and larger and are now getting so big they are actually reducing performance. Long-time technology pundit Bob Cringely even deemed the issue worthy of three of his ten predictions for the new year.

Networks need buffers to function well. Think of a network as a road system where everyone drives at the maximum speed. When the road gets full, there are only two choices: crash into other cars, or get off the road and wait until things get better. The former isn’t as disastrous on a network as it would be in real life: losing packets in the middle of a communication session isn’t a big deal. (Losing them at the beginning or the end of a session can lead to some user-visible delays.) But making a packet wait for a short time is usually better than “dropping” it and having to wait for a retransmission.

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