FastSoft Challenges Google's TCP Project

PASADENA, Calif. -- FastSoft, Inc. today commented on new efforts to improve transport control protocol (TCP) performance that were initiated by Google and are being considered by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Website performance is increasingly recognized as an important factor in user satisfaction. Many major Internet sites have improved all aspects of their website performance; the focus of these improvements has now moved down the stack from the application layer to the transport layer.

Google’s “Make the Web Faster” team has been identifying ways to improve the TCP layer to speed up the web. Google’s proposal improves several areas in the existing TCP implementation, including an increase in the initial TCP congestion window size, a reduction of the initial timeout, TCP Fast Open (TFO) that embeds an application-level request in the initial TCP connection request, and a modification to the current loss recovery algorithm known as proportional rate reduction (PRR). All recommendations are currently under testing in various Linux kernel releases.

“The FastSoft team applauds Google’s efforts in identifying TCP performance improvements,” said Cheng Jin, CTO and VP of engineering at FastSoft. “But like any other technical challenge, there are alternative ways to solve the problem. FastSoft has been a leading promoter of transport layer acceleration for the last several years and has taken a different approach to solving the speed problem by addressing the fundamental deficiencies in TCP’s congestion control mechanism.”

FastSoft Inc.