Enabling BBR on Ubuntu 23.10

Hello,
In this week’s feature highlight, we look at How to Enable BBR on Ubuntu 23.10

BBR stands for Bottleneck Bandwidth and RTT is a congestion control system. You can enable TCP BBR on your Linux desktop to improve the overall web surfing experience. By default, Linux uses the Reno and CUBIC congestion control algorithm.

Enabling BBR in Linux can help improve network performance by optimizing bandwidth utilization, reducing latency, and mitigating packet loss. We’ll show you how this is enabled:

Run the following command to check available congestion control algorithms,

sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_available_congestion_control

Output:

root@ubuntu23:~# sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_available_congestion_control
net.ipv4.tcp_available_congestion_control = reno cubic

Run the below command to check the current congestion control algorithm used in your system,

sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control

Output:

root@ubuntu23:~# sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control
net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control = cubic

Enabling TCP BBR in Ubuntu

Open the following configuration file /etc/sysctl.conf to enable enable TCP BBR.

nano /etc/sysctl.conf

At the end of the config file, add the following lines.

net.core.default_qdisc=fq
net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control=bbr

Save the file, and refresh your configuration by using this command,

sysctl -p

Output:

root@ubuntu23:~# sysctl -p
net.core.default_qdisc = fq
net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control = bbr

Now, Verify if BBR is enabled in your system,

sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control

Output:

root@ubuntu23:~# sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control
net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control = bbr