Reducing web latency
Tobias Flach, Nandita Dukkipati, Andreas Terzis, Barath Raghavan, Neal Cardwell, Yuchung Cheng, Ankur Jain, Shuai Hao, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Ramesh Govindan · 2013
To serve users quickly, Web service providers build infrastructure closer to clients and use multi-stage transport connections. Although these changes reduce client-perceived round-trip times, TCP's current mechanisms fundamentally limit latency improvements. We performed a measurement study of a large Web service provider and found that, while connections with no loss complete close to the ideal latency of one round-trip time, TCP's timeout-driven recovery causes transfers with loss to take five times longer on average.