3 ms·

It's not that TCP can't be changed, it's that it's the only option that works. TCP is baked into firmware on edge routers and firewalls and wifi devices that a

It's not that TCP can't be changed, it's that it's the only option that works. TCP is baked into firmware on edge routers and firewalls and wifi devices that are beyond the period of support and the companies that created them aren't interested in supporting them or have gone out of business. There are other protocols in layer 4 that could have been used that are better on some workloads than TCP, but TCP and UDP were the only things configured/supported; many firewall default configurations filter out things they don't recognize so anything new is a non-starter. And because of the perception of responsibility when it comes to networks, if I support a new protocol and you can't connect to it because there's older devices between you and me, it becomes my problem.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago
So much this. Its ossified so far that if your DHCP packet isn't padded in just the right way, some firewalls will block it. Somebody mis-read the RFC and put in some rule, and now many Enterprise firewalls do this. Sigh. Anyway, anothing not 'normal' is being filtered out somewhere. We even (at one startup) considered tunneling RTP through HTTP! My god.
PudgePacket 6y ago
QUIC is built on UDP, not sure if you were aware based on your 3rd paragraph? > One concern about the move from TCP to UDP is that TCP is widely adopted and many of the "middle-boxes" in the internet infrastructure are tuned for TCP and rate-limit or even block UDP. Google carried out a number of exploratory experiments to characterize this and found that only a small number of connections were blocked in this manner.[3] This led to the use of a rapid fallback-to-TCP system; Chromium's network stack opens both a QUIC and traditional TCP connection at the same time, which allows it to fallback with zero latency.[17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC#Characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC#Characteristics

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

So much this. Its ossified so far that if your DHCP packet isn't padded in just the right way, some firewalls will block it. Somebody mis-read the RFC and put in some rule, and now many Enterprise firewalls do this. Sigh. Anyway, anothing not 'normal' is being filtered out somewhere. We even (at one startup) considered tunneling RTP through HTTP! My god.

PudgePacket 6y ago

QUIC is built on UDP, not sure if you were aware based on your 3rd paragraph? > One concern about the move from TCP to UDP is that TCP is widely adopted and many of the "middle-boxes" in the internet infrastructure are tuned for TCP and rate-limit or even block UDP. Google carried out a number of exploratory experiments to characterize this and found that only a small number of connections were blocked in this manner.[3] This led to the use of a rapid fallback-to-TCP system; Chromium's network stack opens both a QUIC and traditional TCP connection at the same time, which allows it to fallback with zero latency.[17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC#Characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC#Characteristics