How To Enable BBR on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to enable BBR on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, BBR a.k.a Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time is a new congestion control algorithm developed at Google. It helps to improve the connection speed. The main goal of BBR is to initiate network utilization and reduce queuing. However, this feature should only be enabled on servers and not at the network or client level.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step enabling TCP BBR on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 22.04, 20.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• An active internet connection.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Enable BBR on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install wget apt-transport-https gnupg2 software-properties-common

Step 2. Enable BBR on Ubuntu 22.04.

Before starting, check the availability of the compression algorithms:

sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_available_congestion_control

Output:

net.ipv4.tcp_available_congestion_control = reno cubic

To check the current congestion control algorithm in use, run:

sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control

Output:

net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control = cubic

Now we enable BBR, edit the /etc/sysctl.conf file:

nano /etc/sysctl.conf

Add the following content to the file:

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

Save the file, then refresh your configuration by using this command:

sysctl -p

Output:

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

Also, you can use the command below to verify it:

sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control

Congratulations! You have successfully enabled BBR. Thanks for using this tutorial to boost network performance by enabling TCP BBR BBR on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Ubuntu website.