3 ms·
TCP's slow-start and exponential backoff algorithms are absolute murder when your pipe has a large bandwidth-delay product. There are a whole slew of UDP-based
by josephruscio 17y ago
TCP's slow-start and exponential backoff algorithms are absolute murder when your pipe has a large bandwidth-delay product. There are a whole slew of UDP-based implementations (and a couple TCP variants) targeted at large data transfers over such pipes.
The underlying problem is trying to achieve fairness not only between instances of the new protocol itself (which this implementation and many others claim), but also fairness with instances of the legacy TCP protocol (this protocol's claim seems to be a little weaker here).
- sayrer 17y agoSuccessful businesses have been built in this space. Netli worked this angle and got acquired by Akamai.
- josephruscio 17y agoYep. FastTCP is a pretty elegant algorithm that happens to covered by all sorts of patents. Was a company behind it as well that seems to still be doing OK (FastSoft). Unfortunately won't be turning up in Linux et al due to those angles :-(.
- huhtenberg 17y agoThere is also TCP/Vegas, which is based on the same idea, as good as FastTCP for all practical intents and purposes, comes with Linux 2.6 and unencumbered by the patents.
- herf 17y agoAt least HTTP keepalive helps slow-start once you've "warmed up" a connection to a particular server.