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The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3

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Re: The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3

#92
post #88
post #85

Is QUIC implemented at the kernel level like TCP/UDP, or is it entirely userland? Is it encapsulated in UDP packets?

Most implementations[1] implement it in userland, but this is by no means a requirement. There is no implementation for the Linux kernel presently, but both msquic and F5's QUIC implementation can run in their respective kernels. QUIC is indeed built on top of UDP datagrams, much in the same way TCP is built (typically) on top of IP datagrams. [1] https://github.com/quicwg/base-drafts/wiki/Implementations

Thanks for the info :)

Re: The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3

#93
post #31

I am really happy Google and others are pushing QUIC, but for only one main reason: networks that disallow UDP will now be considered "broken." Without something to push UDP usage its possible we could end up with a TCP-only Internet that would make P2P connectivity more or less impossible.

Unfortunately, we may yet see networks that block or slow down QUIC, in a paradoxical attempt to improve performance.

QUIC is designed to hide a lot from the network. But some network nodes use visibility into things like round-trip time, data-in-flight and packet loss for each flow, so they can adjust queuing parameters to optimise for each user. These measurements are easy to get from monitoring TCP, but not QUIC.

The designers of those network nodes may conclude that blocking QUIC (UDP on port 443) and forcing fallback to HTTP/2 over TCP results in better ability to optimise network flows than allowing QUIC to go ahead. All browsers race TCP against QUIC, so a network blocking QUIC shouldn't significantly slow performance compared with just HTTP/2.

Re: The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3

#94
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are there two meanings of QUIC in the first place?

Some years back, Google had two experimental pieces of work to try to speed up HTTP named QUIC and SPDY (as in "Quick" and "Speedy"). The output from the experiments was new standardization efforts at the IETF. Google's SPDY, which was a binary HTTP protocol over TLS, eventually resulted in HTTP/2 which there's a fair chance you use today. The other idea, QUIC, is a much bigger lift. It replaces not just the HTTP pro…

Good and concise explanation thank you

Re: The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3

#95

By the way, even though it is not yet turned on by default, http3 support is present in Firefox and can be activated by toggling 'network.http.http3.enabled' in about:config to true. I have had it enabled for a few weeks and everything seems okay except that rarely I've noticed a few sites not loading the first time I visit them but needing a 'refresh', but I'm not sure if this is because of the new QUIC code or just…

Ah, the race to the bottom has begun with http too.

Can't wait for http 4, 5 & 6 to be released next year so that a few companies can fight to steer the direction of the Web.

Re: The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3

#96
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, it's very slow for me, and usually triggers warnings from Safari for excess resource consumption.

Heavy JS apps (eg:React) have all had perf issues on my Safari. Not just FB, anyone using React has cause this issue on my machine. Chrome and FF also using more resources for Heavy JS (not as much as Safari) but maybe they just have better engines. I loathe the over-js'd web.

React apps are generally slow in Firefox, as well.

Re: The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3

#99
post #31

I am really happy Google and others are pushing QUIC, but for only one main reason: networks that disallow UDP will now be considered "broken." Without something to push UDP usage its possible we could end up with a TCP-only Internet that would make P2P connectivity more or less impossible.

TOR, at the moment, is based on TCP and since the whole architecture is based on the assumption of TCP, I don't see it changing anytime soon. QUIC means TOR is now "legacy" unless we just do the right thing and boycott QUIC.

Re: The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3

#100
post #34

Is this possible with NodeJS + express already? I didn't see any package for that or config

For people running apps behind Cloudfront/Fastly/Cloudflare, is it similar to h2 where it can be enabled at the CDN level, or load balancer?

Yes, you can enable H3 support in the Cloudflare dashboard. We serve... lots... of H3 requests every second on behalf of our customers.

More on our blog https://blog.cloudflare.com/http3-the-past-present-and-futur...

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