Asymmetric splice: optimizing TCP forwarder performance for the HTTP/1.1 protocol
Saibal K. Adhya, Saugata Das-Purkayastha, Šumit Ganguly · 2002
The presence of TCP forwarders, namely, network nodes that establish and forward data between a pair of TCP connections, is ubiquitous in current networks. A kernel mechanism called TCP splice was proposed by Maltz and Bhagawat [5] and by Spatschek, Hansen and Hartman [2] to improve the performance of TCP forwarders. We show that the TGP splice mechanism in [5] is of limited utility in scenarios where multiple requests could arrive on the same TCP connection, for example, as permitted by the HTTP/1.1 protocol. We address this problem by designing and implementing a new kernel mechanism called Asymmetric TCP Splice that extends the benefits of TCP splice for the HTTP/1.1 protocol.