research-article

Open access

Reducing web latency: the virtue of gentle aggression

Authors:

Nandita Dukkipati,

Andreas Terzis,

Barath Raghavan,

Ethan Katz-Bassett, and

Ramesh GovindanAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCOMM '13: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference on SIGCOMM

August 2013

Pages 159 - 170

https://doi.org/10.1145/2486001.2486014

Published: 27 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

To serve users quickly, Web service providers build infrastructure closer to clients and use multi-stage transport connections. Although these changes reduce client-perceived round-trip times, TCP's current mechanisms fundamentally limit latency improvements. We performed a measurement study of a large Web service provider and found that, while connections with no loss complete close to the ideal latency of one round-trip time, TCP's timeout-driven recovery causes transfers with loss to take five times longer on average.

In this paper, we present the design of novel loss recovery mechanisms for TCP that judiciously use redundant transmissions to minimize timeout-driven recovery. Proactive, Reactive, and Corrective are three qualitatively-different, easily-deployable mechanisms that (1) proactively recover from losses, (2) recover from them as quickly as possible, and (3) reconstruct packets to mask loss. Crucially, the mechanisms are compatible both with middleboxes and with TCP's existing congestion control and loss recovery. Our large-scale experiments on Google's production network that serves billions of flows demonstrate a 23% decrease in the mean and 47% in 99th percentile latency over today's TCP.

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Index Terms

Reducing web latency: the virtue of gentle aggression
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
  2. Document types
    1. Computing standards, RFCs and guidelines
2. Networks
  1. Network protocols

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cover image ACM Conferences

SIGCOMM '13: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference on SIGCOMM

August 2013

580 pages

ISBN:9781450320566

DOI:10.1145/2486001

General Chairs:
Dah Ming Chiu
Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
,
Jia Wang
AT&T Labs - Research, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Paul Barford
University of Wisconsin, USA
,
Srinivasan Seshan
Carnegie Mellon University, USA

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 43, Issue 4
October 2013
595 pages
ISSN:0146-4833
DOI:10.1145/2534169
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 27 August 2013

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SIGCOMM'13: ACM SIGCOMM 2013 Conference

August 12 - 16, 2013

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SIGCOMM '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 38 of 246 submissions, 15%;

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Ozcan SLivadariu ISmaragdakis GGriwodz C(2023)Longitudinal Analysis of Inter-City Network Delays2023 7th Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA)10.23919/TMA58422.2023.10198987(1-9)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.23919/TMA58422.2023.10198987
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