Comment by mprovost 13 hours ago
In general TCP just isn't great for high performance. In the film industry we used to use a commercial product Aspera (now owned by IBM) which emulated ftp or scp but used UDP with forward error correction (instead of TCP retransmission). You could configure it to use a specific amount of bandwidth and it would just push everything else off the network to achieve it.
> I get 40 Gbit/s over a single localhost TCP stream on my 10 years old laptop with iperf3.
Do you mean literally just streaming data from one process to another on the same machine, without that data ever actually transiting a real network link? There's so many caveats to that test that it's basically worthless for evaluating what could happen on a real network.
Aspera was/is designed for high latency links. Ie sending multi terabytes from london to new Zealand, or LA
For that use case, Aspera was the best tool for the job. It's designed to be fast over links that single TCP streams couldn't
You could, if you were so bold, stack up multiple TCP links and send data down those. You got the same speed, but possible not the same efficiency. It was a fucktonne cheaper to do though.
There's an open source implementation that does something similar but for a more specific use case: https://github.com/apernet/tcp-brutal
There's gotta be a less antisocial way though. I'd say using BBR and increasing the buffer sizes to 64 MiB does the trick in most cases.
If you strip out the swarm logic (ie. downloading from multiple peers), you're just left with a protocol that transfers big files via chunks, so there's no reason that'd be faster than any other sort of download manager that supports multi-thread downloads.
Aspera did the chunking and encryption for you, and it looked and acted like SFTP.
The cost of leaking data was/is catastrophic (as in company ending) So paying a bit of money to guarantee that your data was being sent to the right place (point to point) and couldn't leak was a worthwhile tradeoff.
For Point to point transfer torrenting is a lot higher overhead than you want. plus most clients have an anti-leaching setting, so you'd need not only a custom client, but a custom protocol as well.
The idea is sound though, have an index file with and then a list of chunks to pull over multiple TCP connections.
torrent is great for many-to-one type downloads but I assume GP is talking about single machine to single machine transfers.
I'm in a tiny part of the film industry. Bigger clients lend us licenses to Aspera and FileCatalyst when receiving files from them, but for our own trans-oceanic transfers I dug up an ancient program called Tsunami UDP and fixed it up just enough.
Aspera's FASP [0] is very neat. One drawback to it is that the TCP stuff not being done the traditional way must be done on CPU. Say if one packet is missing or if packets are sent out of order, the Aspera client fixes those instead of all that being done as TCP.
As I understand it, this is also the approach of WEKA.io [1]. Another approach is RDMA [2] used by storage systems like Vast which pushes those order and resend tasks to NICs that support RDMA so that applications can read and write directly to the network instead of to system buffers.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_and_Secure_Protocol
1. https://docs.weka.io/weka-system-overview/weka-client-and-mo...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_direct_memory_access
FASP uses forward error correction instead of retransmission. So instead of waiting for something not to show up on the other end and sending it again, it calculates parity and transmits slightly more data up front, with enough redundancy that the receiving end is capable of reconstructing any missing bits. This is basically how all storage systems work, not just Weka. You calculate enough parity bits to be able to reconstruct the missing data when a drive fails. The more disks you have, the smaller the parity overhead is. Object storage like S3 does this on a massive scale. With a network transfer you typically only need a few percent, unless it's really lossy like Wifi, in which case standards like 802.11n are doing FEC for you to reduce retransmissions at the TCP layer.
What does "high performance" mean here?
I get 40 Gbit/s over a single localhost TCP stream on my 10 years old laptop with iperf3.
So the TCP does not seem to be a bottleneck if 40 Gbit/s is "high" enough, which it probably is currently for most people.
I have also seen plenty situations in which TCP is faster than UDP in datacenters.
For example, on Hetzner Cloud VMs, iperf3 gets me 7 Gbit/s over TCP but only 1.5 Gbit/s over UDP. On Hetzner dedicated servers with 10 Gbit links, I get 10 Gbit/s over TCP but only 4.5 Gbit/s over UDP. But this could also be due to my use of iperf3 or its implementation.
I also suspect that TCP being a protocol whose state is inspectable by the network equipment between endpoints allows implementing higher performance, but I have not validated if that is done.