QUIC is not Quick Enough over Fast Internet

Xumiao Zhang, Shuowei Jin, Yi He, Ahmad Hassan, Zhuoqing Mao, Feng Qian, Zhi-Li Zhang

Keywords: QUIC, transport, web, network performance

TL;DR: A series of experiments that reveal QUIC's slowness over modern fast Internet and an in-depth root cause analysis.

Abstract: QUIC is expected to be a game-changer in improving web application performance. In this paper, we conduct a systematic examination of QUIC's performance over high-speed networks. We find that over fast Internet, the UDP+QUIC+HTTP/3 stack suffers a data rate reduction of up to 45.2% compared to the TCP+TLS+HTTP/2 counterpart. Moreover, the performance gap between QUIC and HTTP/2 grows as the underlying bandwidth increases. We observe this issue on lightweight data transfer clients and major web browsers (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera), on different hosts (desktop, mobile), and over diverse networks (wired broadband, cellular). It affects not only file transfers, but also various applications such as video streaming (up to 9.8% video bitrate reduction) and web browsing. Through rigorous packet trace analysis and kernel- and user-space profiling, we identify the root cause to be high receiver-side processing overhead, in particular, excessive data packets and QUIC's user-space ACKs. We make concrete recommendations for mitigating the observed performance issues.

Track: Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile, and WoT

Submission Guidelines Scope: Yes

Submission Guidelines Blind: Yes

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Student Author: Yes

Submission Number: 90