Celebrating zero packet loss: the long-awaited dream of lossless internet

Description

The meme shows a man in a white dress shirt and tie, holding up a tiny object between his thumb and index finger as though examining a scientific breakthrough. Large white Impact-style text at the top reads “FINALLY”, and at the bottom “LOSSLESS INTERNET”. The object he’s holding is partially blurred, but a vertical diagnostic overlay remains visible with the words “Packet loss: not available”. The humor plays on network engineering jargon - packet loss is normally unavoidable on the public internet - so the idea of truly ‘lossless internet’ is treated like a monumental lab discovery. Seasoned developers will recognize the implication that 0 % packet loss would solve countless latency and reliability headaches in production systems

Common Tags

Networking NetworkLatency RelatableHumor Performance

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick Finally, 0 % packet loss - deleting exponential backoff, archiving half the SRE runbooks, and telling congestion control to update its LinkedIn

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

Finally, 0 % packet loss - deleting exponential backoff, archiving half the SRE runbooks, and telling congestion control to update its LinkedIn
Anonymous

After 20 years of tuning TCP congestion algorithms, implementing QoS policies, and sacrificing weekends to BGP flapping, you realize the only truly lossless internet exists in the same place as your work-life balance: marketing slides
Anonymous

'Packet Loss: Not available' isn't lossless internet - the loss metric itself got dropped in transit
Anonymous

After 50 years of networking evolution, we've finally achieved what TCP has been promising since 1974: reliable delivery without the 'mostly' qualifier. Now if only we could get the same guarantee for production deployments on Fridays
Anonymous

We hit 0% packet loss the day security blocked ICMP and our PromQL coalesced null to zero - turns out the only lossless network is the one you’re not measuring
Anonymous

TCP engineers weeping tears of joy: no more retransmits, just pure ACK bliss - until the first fiber cut
Anonymous

Our Grafana panel shows packet_loss=N/A - apparently the fastest route to five nines is not measuring it
@CcxCZ 4y

That's just https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_switching and we had that way back. Dropping packets on a packet switched network is essential for congestion control. If you don't do that you first get bufferbloat and eventually fill RAM.