Is QUIC really Quicker?

QUIC is a relatively new data transport protocol developed by Google, and currently in line to become the default transport for the upcoming HTTP standard. Because of this, it behooves every network engineer to understand a little about this protocol, how it operates, and what impact it will have on the network. We did record a History of Networking episode on QUIC, if you want some background.

In a recent Communications of the ACM article, a group of researchers (Kakhi et al.) used a modified implementation of QUIC to measure its performance under different network conditions, directly comparing it to TCPs performance under the same conditions. Since the current implementations of QUIC use the same congestion control as TCP—Cubic—the only differences in performance should be code tuning in estimating the round-trip timer (RTT) for congestion control, QUIC’s ability to form a session in a single RTT, and QUIC’s ability to carry multiple streams in a single connection. The researchers asked two questions in this paper: how does QUIC interact with TCP flows on the same network, and does UIC perform better than TCP in all situations, or only some?

To answer the first question, the authors tried running QUIC and TCP over the same network in different configurations, including single QUIC and TCP sessions, a single QUIC session with multiple TCP sessions, etc. In each case, they discovered that QUIC consumed about 50% of the bandwidth; if there were multiple TCP sessions, they would be starved for bandwidth when running in parallel with the QUIC session. For network folk, this means an application implemented using QUIC could well cause performance issues for other applications on the network—something to be aware of. This might mean it is best, if possible, to push QUIC-based applications into a separate virtual or physical topology with strict bandwidth controls if it causes other applications to perform poorly.

Does QUIC’s ability to consume more bandwidth mean applications developed on top of it will perform better? According to the research in this paper, the answer is how many balloons fit in a bag? In other words, it all depends. QUIC does perform better when its multi-stream capability comes into play and the network is stable—for instance, when transferring variably sized objects (files) across a network with stable jitter and delay. In situations with high jitter or delay, however, TCP consistently outperforms QUIC.

TCP outperforming QUIC is a bit of a surprise in any situation; how is this possible? The researchers used information from their additional instrumentation to discover QUIC does not tolerate out-of-order packet delivery very well because of its fast packet retransmission implementation. Presumably, it should be possible to modify these parameters somewhat to make QUIC perform better.

This would still leave the second problem the researchers found with QUIC’s performance—a large difference between its performance on desktop and mobile platforms. The difference between these two comes down to where QUIC is implemented. Desktop devices (and/or servers) often have smart NICs which implement TCP in the ASIC to speed packet processing up. QUIC, because it runs in user space, only runs on the main processor (it seems hard to see how a user space application could run on a NIC—it would probably require a specialized card of some type, but I’ll have to think about this more). The result is that QUIC’s performance depends heavily on the speed of the processor. Since mobile devices have much slower processors, QUIC performs much more slowly on mobile devices.

QUIC is an interesting new transport protocol—one everyone involved in designing or operating networks is eventually going to encounter. This paper gives good insight into the “soul” of this new protocol.