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The need to upgrade the OS is only a small part of the problem. On the one hand, the fact the TCP is unchanging has led to network cards supporting TCP directl
by phicoh 3y ago
The need to upgrade the OS is only a small part of the problem.
On the one hand, the fact the TCP is unchanging has led to network cards supporting TCP directly. You can shove a large segment of data in the network card and it will split the data up in TCP segments and transmit them. There are also big content companies that let the kernel do all TLS encryption, in some cases that can also be offloaded to hardware.
The big problem for TCP is all the boxes on the internet that understand TCP and don't understand TCP extensions. That could be home routers doing NAT, firewalls, etc. Those boxes are not only hard to upgrade, they also break things. QUIC fixes this by making sure that as much as possible is encrypted.
Some ISPs monitor TCP headers and from retransmissions they can figure out where problems are in the network. QUIC will take that ability away.
So QUIC is a mixed blessing.
- doctor_eval 3y agoI disagree. If there’s a financial incentive (better performance or whatever) then the server side will upgrade; it’s a financial and timing decision with strong motivators. But the client side problem is 5-6 orders of magnitude larger than the server side problem - and to make things worse, they basically don’t care. People seem happy enough to upgrade their browser, but upgrading their OS is a big deal. Even I don’t like doing it, and I consider it important. So I think a reasonable rule of thumb would be, the server side will take care of itself. But if you need your clients to reboot their computer to upgrade the network stack to improve your server performance, well, it ain’t gonna happen.