4 ms·

regardless of website bloat, tcp is pure garbage when dealing with even minimal packet loss and it has always contributed to the crappy feeling that mobile conn

regardless of website bloat, tcp is pure garbage when dealing with even minimal packet loss and it has always contributed to the crappy feeling that mobile connections have. if something doesn't start loading in 5 seconds and you are still giving it time without jumping up and down, tcp gave you stockholm syndrome. I'm not familiar with quic so I don't know how to feel about it, but we are in dire need of an alternative that doesn't require reimplementing the good parts of tcp over udp like every game and communication apps in the world do.

howdydoo 5y ago
Are you alluding to SCTP/DCCP? Or is there some other protocol I don't know about?
ReactiveJelly 5y ago
I think QUIC is gonna be it, at least for the next 10 years. It has unreliable, unordered datagrams, and a huge number of TCP-like streams, all wrapped in the same TLS'd connection. When I look at QUIC, I see old TCP protocols like IRC and telnet coming back. The difficulty of encryption pushed many applications into HTTPS so they could stay safe, even though HTTPS isn't a perfect fit for every app. With QUIC saying "You're as safe as possible and you have basically a UDP and TCP portal to the server, have fun", I think we'll see some custom protocols built / rebuilt on QUIC that were lying dormant since the age when encryption was optional. For instance, multiplayer games could probably just use QUIC as-is. Send the real-time data over the datagrams, and send the chat messages and important game state over the streams. Instead of some custom game communications library, and instead of connecting TCP and UDP to the same server, one QUIC library and one QUIC connection. Now it's within the reach of a solo indie developer who wants to focus on their game-specific netcode, and not on re-inventing networking ideas.
- jayd16 5y ago
  Does the HTTP/3 spec provide access to UDP-like (non-retransmitted) requests? It looks like this might need another extension?
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    The suggestion is to throw out HTTP entirely and build a nice tight protocol on top of QUIC.
    - jayd16 5y ago
      The question applies to QUIC. My reading of the QUIC spec states that packets must be acked. Is there some trick to allow other datagrams?
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-tiesel-quic-unreliable-streams-01 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-tiesel-quic-unre... https://quicwg.org/datagram/draft-ietf-quic-datagram.html https://quicwg.org/datagram/draft-ietf-quic-datagram.html They're working on it, I guess.
superkuh 5y ago
Yes. Mobile wireless is intrinsically bad due to random round trip times and packet loss. But we shouldn't make the rest of the internet walk with crutches just because mobile clients need them.

howdydoo 5y ago

Are you alluding to SCTP/DCCP? Or is there some other protocol I don't know about?

ReactiveJelly 5y ago

I think QUIC is gonna be it, at least for the next 10 years. It has unreliable, unordered datagrams, and a huge number of TCP-like streams, all wrapped in the same TLS'd connection. When I look at QUIC, I see old TCP protocols like IRC and telnet coming back. The difficulty of encryption pushed many applications into HTTPS so they could stay safe, even though HTTPS isn't a perfect fit for every app. With QUIC saying "You're as safe as possible and you have basically a UDP and TCP portal to the server, have fun", I think we'll see some custom protocols built / rebuilt on QUIC that were lying dormant since the age when encryption was optional. For instance, multiplayer games could probably just use QUIC as-is. Send the real-time data over the datagrams, and send the chat messages and important game state over the streams. Instead of some custom game communications library, and instead of connecting TCP and UDP to the same server, one QUIC library and one QUIC connection. Now it's within the reach of a solo indie developer who wants to focus on their game-specific netcode, and not on re-inventing networking ideas.

jayd16 5y ago
Does the HTTP/3 spec provide access to UDP-like (non-retransmitted) requests? It looks like this might need another extension?
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  The suggestion is to throw out HTTP entirely and build a nice tight protocol on top of QUIC.
  - jayd16 5y ago
    The question applies to QUIC. My reading of the QUIC spec states that packets must be acked. Is there some trick to allow other datagrams?
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-tiesel-quic-unreliable-streams-01 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-tiesel-quic-unre... https://quicwg.org/datagram/draft-ietf-quic-datagram.html https://quicwg.org/datagram/draft-ietf-quic-datagram.html They're working on it, I guess.

superkuh 5y ago

Yes. Mobile wireless is intrinsically bad due to random round trip times and packet loss. But we shouldn't make the rest of the internet walk with crutches just because mobile clients need them.