alt Hacker NewsI think the ‘fast’ claims are just different. QUIC is meant to make things fast by:
- having a lower latency handshake
- avoiding some badly behaved ‘middleware’ boxes between users and servers
- avoiding resetting connections when user up addresses change
- avoiding head of line blocking / the increased cost of many connections ramping up
- avoiding poor congestion control algorithms
- probably other things too
And those are all things about working better with the kind of network situations you tend to see between users (often on mobile devices) and servers. I don’t think QUIC was meant to be fast by reducing OS overhead on sending data, and one should generally expect it to be slower for a long time until operating systems become better optimised for this flow and hardware supports offloading more of the work. If you are Google then presumably you are willing to invest in specialised network cards/drivers/software for that.
Replies
> - avoiding some badly behaved ‘middleware’ boxes between users and servers
Surely badly behaving middleboxes won't just ignore UDP traffic? If anything, they'd get confused about udp/443 and act up, forcing clients to fall back to normal TCP.
Yeah I totally get that it optimizes for different things. But the trade offs seem way too severe. Does saving one round trip on the handshake mean anything at all if you're only getting one fourth of the throughput?