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This was originally published on Perf Planet's 2019 Web Performance Calendar.
QUIC, the new Internet transport protocol designed to accelerate HTTP traffic, is delivered on top of UDP datagrams, to ease deployment and avoid interference from network appliances that drop packets from unknown protocols. This also allows QUIC implementations to live in user-space, so that, for example, browsers will be able to implement new protocol features and ship them to their users without having to wait for operating systems updates.
But while a lot of work has gone into optimizing TCP implementations as much as possible over the years, including building offloading capabilities in both software (like in operating systems) and hardware (like in network interfaces), UDP hasn't received quite as much attention as TCP, which puts QUIC at a disadvantage. In this post we'll look at a few tricks that help mitigate this disadvantage for UDP, and by association QUIC.
For the purpose of this blog post we will only be concentrating on measuring throughput of QUIC connections, which, while necessary, is not enough to paint an accurate overall picture of the performance of the QUIC protocol (or its implementations) as a whole.
Test Environment
The client used Continue reading