Re: HTTP/2 and TCP CWND

[William Chan (陈智昌) <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 8:40 AM, Peter Lepeska <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Not sure this has been proposed before, but better than caching would be
> dynamic initial CWND based on web server object size hinting.
>
> Web servers often know the size of the object that will be sent to the
> browser. The web server therefore can help the transport make smart initial
> CWND decisions. For instance, if an object is less than 20KB, which is true
> for the majority of objects on web pages, the web server could tell the
> transport to increase the CWND to a size that would allow the object to be
> sent in the initial window.
>

In the HTTP/2 case where we often are multiplexing, this doesn't seem to
make as much sense. Also, I'm not sure that it's a reasonable argument to
select initcwnd in absence of any congestion information...or were you
suggesting merely tweaking the initcwnd a little bit if that little bit
would make a difference in terms of fitting the whole object in the
initcwnd?

Caching attempts to reuse old congestion information, although it has been
reasonably pointed out that the validity of that information is
questionable. It's an open research question as far as I'm concerned, and
I'd love to see any data people had.


>
> For larger objects, the benefit of a large CWND is minimal so the web
> server could tell the transport to use the default and let the connection
> ramp slowly.
>

I'm not sure this makes sense. GMail and Google+ and I'm sure other large
web apps have rather large scripts and stylesheets, but they still care
about their initial page load latency. Perhaps you're making the assumption
that large objects implies the user does not have interactivity /
low-latency expectations? If so, that's invalid. Those roundtrips still
matter and I can tell you our Google app teams work very hard to eliminate
them. Or maybe your definition is large is larger than what I'm thinking.


> Peter
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 8:16 PM, Roberto Peon <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 4:03 PM, Eggert, Lars <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>>
>>> On Apr 15, 2013, at 15:56, Roberto Peon <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>> > The interesting thing about the client mucking with this data is that,
>>> so
>>> > long as the server's TCP implementation is smart enough not to kill
>>> itself
>>> > (and some simple limits accomplish that), the only on the client harms
>>> is
>>> > itself...
>>>
>>> I fail to see how you'd be able to achieve this. If the server uses a
>>> CWND that is too large, it will inject a burst of packets into the network
>>> that will overflow a queue somewhere. Unless you use WFQ or something
>>> similar on all bottleneck queues (not generally possible), that burst will
>>> likely cause packet loss to other flows, and will therefore impact them.
>>>
>>
>> The most obvious way is that the server doesn't use a CWND which is
>> larger than the largest currently active window to a similar RTT. The other
>> obvious way is to limit it to something like 32, which is about what we'd
>> see with the opening of a mere 3 regular HTTP connections! This at least
>> makes the one connection competitive with the circumventions that HTTP/1.X
>> currently exhibits.
>>
>>
>>> TCP is a distributed resource sharing algorithm to allocate capacity
>>> throughout a network. Although the rates for all flows are computed in
>>> isolation, the effect of that computation is not limited to the flow in
>>> question, because all flows share the same queues.
>>>
>>
>> Yes, that is what I've been arguing w.r.t. the many connections that the
>> application-layer currently opens :)
>> It becomes a question of which dragon is actually most dangerous.
>>
>> -=R
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Lars
>>
>>
>>
>