Tag Archives: QUIC

cURL and libcurl, Open Source

The curl year 2017

I’m about to take an extended vacation for the rest of the year and into the beginning of the next, so I decided I’d sum up the year from a curl angle already now, a few weeks early. (So some numbers will grow a bit more after this post.)

2017

So what did we do this year in the project, how did curl change?

The first curl release of the year was version 7.53.0 and the last one was 7.57.0. In the separate blog posts on 7.55.0, 7.56.0 and 7.57.0 you’ll note that we kept up adding new goodies and useful features. We produced a total of 9 releases containing 683 bug fixes. We announced twelve security problems. (Down from 24 last year.)

At least 125 different authors wrote code that was merged into curl this year, in the 1500 commits that were made. We never had this many different authors during a single year before in the project’s entire life time! (The 114 authors during 2016 was the previous all-time high.)

We added more than 160 new names to the THANKS document for their help in improving curl. The total amount of contributors is now over 1660.

This year we truly started to use travis for CI builds and grew from a mere two builds per commit and PR up to nineteen (with additional ones run on appveyor and elsewhere). The current build set is a very good verification that that most things still compile and work after a PR is merged. (see also the testing curl article).

Mozilla announced that they too will use colon-slash-slash in their logo. Of course we all know who had it that in their logo first… =)

 

In March 2017, we had our first ever curl get-together as we arranged curl up 2017 a weekend in Nuremberg, Germany. It was very inspiring and meeting parts of the team in real life was truly a blast. This was so good we intend to do it again: curl up 2018 will happen.

curl turned 19 years old in March. In May it surpassed 5,000 stars on github.

Also in May, we moved over the official curl site (and my personal site) to get hosted by Fastly. We were beginning to get problems to handle the bandwidth and load, and in one single step all our worries were graciously taken care of!

We got curl entered into the OSS-fuzz project, and Max Dymond even got a reward from Google for his curl-fuzzing integration work and thanks to that project throwing heaps of junk at libcurl’s APIs we’ve found and fixed many issues.

The source code (for the tool and library only) is now at about 143,378 lines of code. It grew around 7,057 lines during the year. The primary reasons for the code growth were:

  1. the new libssh-powered SSH backend (not yet released)
  2. the new mime API (in 7.56.0) and
  3. the new multi-SSL backend support (also in 7.56.0).

Your maintainer’s view

Oh what an eventful year it has been for me personally.

The first interim meeting for QUIC took place in Japan, and I participated from remote. After all, I’m all set on having curl support QUIC and I’ll keep track of where the protocol is going! I’ve participated in more interim meetings after that, all from remote so far.

I talked curl on the main track at FOSDEM in early February (and about HTTP/2 in the Mozilla devroom). I’ve then followed that up and have also had the pleasure to talk in front of audiences in Stockholm, Budapest, Jönköping and Prague through-out the year.

 

I went to London and “represented curl” in the third edition of the HTTP workshop, where HTTP protocol details were discussed and disassembled, and new plans for the future of HTTP were laid out.

 

In late June I meant to go to San Francisco to a Mozilla “all hands” conference but instead I was denied to board the flight. That event got a crazy amount of attention and I received massive amounts of love from new and old friends. I have not yet tried to enter the US again, but my plan is to try again in 2018…

I wrote and published my h2c tool, meant to help developers convert a set of HTTP headers into a working curl command line.

The single occasion that overshadows all other events and happenings for me this year by far, was without doubt when I was awarded the Polhem Prize and got a gold medal medal from no other than his majesty the King of Sweden himself. For all my work and years spent on curl no less.

Not really curl related, but in November I was also glad to be part of the huge Firefox Quantum release. The biggest Firefox release ever, and one that has been received really well.

I’ve managed to commit over 800 changes to curl through the year, which is 54% of the totals and more commits than I’ve done in curl during a single year since 2005 (in which I did 855 commits). I explain this increase mostly on inspiration from curl up and the prize, but I think it also happened thanks to excellent feedback and motivation brought by my fellow curl hackers.

We’re running towards the end of 2017 with me being the individual who did most commits in curl every single month for the last 28 months.

2018?

More things to come!

Mozilla, Work

Denied entry

25 Comments

 – Sorry, you’re not allowed entry to the US on your ESTA.

The lady who delivered this message to me this early Monday morning, worked behind the check-in counter at the Arlanda airport. I was there, trying to check-in to my two-leg trip to San Francisco to the Mozilla “all hands” meeting of the summer of 2017. My chance for a while ahead to meet up with colleagues from all around the world.

This short message prevented me from embarking on one journey, but instead took me on another.

Returning home

I was in a bit of a shock by this treatment really. I mean, I wasn’t treated particularly bad or anything but just the fact that they downright refused to take me on for unspecified reasons wasn’t easy to swallow. I sat down for a few moments trying to gather my thoughts on what to do next. I then sent a few tweets out expressing my deep disappointment for what happened, emailed my manager and some others at Mozilla about what happened and that I can’t come to the meeting and then finally walked out the door again and traveled back home.

This tweet sums up what I felt at the time:

Then the flood

That Monday passed with some casual conversations with people of what I had experienced, and then…

Someone posted to hacker news about me. That post quickly rose to the top position and it began. My twitter feed suddenly got all crazy with people following me and retweeting my rejection tweets from yesterday. Several well-followed people retweeted me and that caused even more new followers and replies.

By the end of the Tuesday, I had about 2000 new followers and twitter notifications that literally were flying by at a high speed.

I was contacted by writers and reporters. The German Linux Magazine was first out to post about me, and then golem.de did the same. I talked to Kate Conger on Gizmodo who wrote Mozilla Employee Denied Entry to the United States. The Register wrote about me. I was for a moment considered for a TV interview, but I think they realized that we had too little facts to actually know why I was denied so maybe it wasn’t really that TV newsworthy.

These articles of course helped boosting my twitter traffic even more.

In the flood of responses, the vast majority were positive and supportive of me. Lots of people highlighted the role of curl and acknowledged that my role in that project has been beneficial for quite a number of internet related software in the world. A whole bunch of the responses offered to help me in various ways. The one most highlighted is probably this one from Microsoft’s Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith:

I also received a bunch of emails. Some of them from people who offered help – and I must say I’m deeply humbled and grateful by the amount of friends I apparently have and the reach this got.

Some of the emails also echoed the spirit of some of the twitter replies I got: quite a few Americans feel guilty, ashamed or otherwise apologize for what happened to me. However, I personally do not at all think of this setback as something that my American friends are behind. And I have many.

Mozilla legal

Tuesday evening I had a phone call with our (Mozilla’s) legal chief about my situation and I helped to clarify exactly what I had done, what I’ve been told and what had happened. There’s a team working now to help me sort out what happened and why, and what I and we can do about it so that I don’t get to experience this again the next time I want to travel to the US. People are involved both on the US as well as on the Swedish side of things.

Personally I don’t have any plans to travel to the US in the near future so there’s no immediate rush. I had already given up attending this Mozilla all-hands.

Repercussions

Mark Nottingham sent an email on the QUIC working group’s mailing list, and here follows two selected sections from it:

You may have seen reports that someone who participates in this work was recently refused entry to the US*, for unspecified reasons.

…

We won’t hold any further interim meetings in the US, until there’s a change in this situation. This means that we’ll either need to find suitable hosts in Canada or Mexico, or our meeting rotation will need to change to be exclusively Europe and Asia.

I trust I don’t actually need to point out that I am that “someone” and again I’m impressed and humbled by the support and actions in my community.

Now what?

I’m now (end of Wednesday, 60 hours since the check-in counter) at 3000 more twitter followers than what I started out with this Monday morning. This turned out to be a totally crazy week and it has severally impacted my productivity. I need to get back to write code, I’m getting behind!

I hope we’ll get some answers soon as to why I was denied and what I can do to fix this for the future. When I get that, I will share all the info I can with you all.

So, back to work!

Thanks again

Before I forget: thank you all. Again. With all my heart. The amount of love I’ve received these last two days is amazing.

Mozilla, Network, Web

HTTP Workshop – London edition. First day.

The HTTP workshop series is back for a third time this northern hemisphere summer. The selected location for the 2017 version is London and this time we’re down to a two-day event (we seem to remove a day every year)…

Nothing in this blog entry is a quote to be attributed to a specific individual but they are my interpretations and paraphrasing of things said or presented. Any mistakes or errors are all mine.

At 9:30 this clear Monday morning, 35 persons sat down around a huge table in a room in the Facebook offices. Most of us are the same familiar faces that have already participated in one or two HTTP workshops, but we also have a set of people this year who haven’t attended before. Getting fresh blood into these discussions is certainly valuable. Most major players are represented, including Mozilla, Google, Facebook, Apple, Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, HA-proxy, Squid, Varnish, BBC, Adobe and curl!

Mark (independent, co-chair of the HTTP working group as well as the QUIC working group) kicked it all off with a presentation on quic and where it is right now in terms of standardization and progress. The upcoming draft-04 is becoming the first implementation draft even though the goal for interop is set basically at handshake and some very basic data interaction. The quic transport protocol is still in a huge flux and things have not settled enough for it to be interoperable right now to a very high level.

Jana from Google presented on quic deployment over time and how it right now uses about 7% of internet traffic. The Android Youtube app’s switch to QUIC last year showed a huge bump in usage numbers. Quic is a lot about reducing latency and numbers show that users really do get a reduction. By that nature, it improves the situation best for those who currently have the worst connections.

It doesn’t solve first world problems, this solves third world connection issues.

The currently observed 2x CPU usage increase for QUIC connections as compared to h2+TLS is mostly blamed on the Linux kernel which apparently is not at all up for this job as good is should be. Things have clearly been more optimized for TCP over the years, leaving room for improvement in the UDP areas going forward. “Making kernel bypassing an interesting choice”.

Alan from Facebook talked header compression for quic and presented data, graphs and numbers on how HPACK(-for-quic), QPACK and QCRAM compare when used for quic in different networking conditions and scenarios. Those are the three current header compression alternatives that are open for quic and Alan first explained the basics behind them and then how they compare when run in his simulator. The current HPACK version (adopted to quic) seems to be out of the question for head-of-line-blocking reasons, the QCRAM suggestion seems to run well but have two main flaws as it requires an awkward layering violation and an annoying possible reframing requirement on resends. Clearly some more experiments can be done, possible with a hybrid where some QCRAM ideas are brought into QPACK. Alan hopes to get his simulator open sourced in the coming months which then will allow more people to experiment and reproduce his numbers.

Hooman from Fastly on problems and challenges with HTTP/2 server push, the 103 early hints HTTP response and cache digests. This took the discussions on push into the weeds and into the dark protocol corners we’ve been in before and all sorts of ideas and suggestions were brought up. Some of them have been discussed before without having been resolved yet and some ideas were new, at least to me. The general consensus seems to be that push is fairly complicated and there are a lot of corner cases and murky areas that haven’t been clearly documented, but it is a feature that is now being used and for the CDN use case it can help with a lot more than “just an RTT”. But is perhaps the 103 response good enough for most of the cases?

The discussion on server push and how well it fares is something the QUIC working group is interested in, since the question was asked already this morning if a first version of quic could be considered to be made without push support. The jury is still out on that I think.

ekr from Mozilla spoke about TLS 1.3, 0-RTT, how the TLS 1.3 handshake looks like and how applications and servers can take advantage of the new 0-RTT and “0.5-RTT” features. TLS 1.3 is already passed the WGLC and there are now “only” a few issues pending to get solved. Taking advantage of 0RTT in an HTTP world opens up interesting questions and issues as HTTP request resends and retries are becoming increasingly prevalent.

Next: day two.

Firefox, Network, Technology

Talk: web transport, today and tomorrow

At the Netnod spring meeting 2017 in Stockholm on the 5th of April I did a talk with the title of this post.

Why was HTTP/2 introduced, how well has HTTP/2 been deployed and used, did it deliver on its promises, where doesn’t HTTP/2 perform as well. Then a quick (haha) overview on what QUIC is and how it intends to fix some of the shortcomings of HTTP/2 and TCP. In 28 minutes.

Mozilla, Network, Open Source, Web

Post FOSDEM 2017

I attended FOSDEM again in 2017 and it was as intense, chaotic and wonderful as ever. I met old friends, got new friends and I got to test a whole range of Belgian beers. Oh, and there was also a set of great open source related talks to enjoy!

On Saturday at 2pm I delivered my talk on curl in the main track in the almost frighteningly large room Janson. I estimate that it was almost half full, which would mean upwards 700 people in the audience. The talk itself went well. I got audible responses from the audience several times and I kept well within my given time with time over for questions. The trickiest problem was the audio from the people who asked questions because it wasn’t at all very easy to hear, while the audio is great for the audience and in the video recording. Slightly annoying because as everyone else heard, it made me appear half deaf. Oh well. I got great questions both then and from people approaching me after the talk. The questions and the feedback I get from a talk is really one of the things that makes me appreciate talking the most.

The video of the talk is available, and the slides can also be viewed.

So after I had spent some time discussing curl things and handing out many stickers after my talk, I managed to land in the cafeteria for a while until it was time for me to once again go and perform.

We’re usually a team of friends that hang out during FOSDEM and we all went over to the Mozilla room to be there perhaps 20 minutes before my talk was scheduled and wow, there was a huge crowd outside of that room already waiting by the time we arrived. When the doors then finally opened (about 10 minutes before my talk started), I had to zigzag my way through to get in, and there was a large amount of people who didn’t get in. None of my friends from the cafeteria made it in!

The Mozilla devroom had 363 seats, not a single one was unoccupied and there was people standing along the sides and the back wall. So, an estimated nearly 400 persons in that room saw me speak about HTTP/2 deployments numbers right now, how HTTP/2 doesn’t really work well under 2% packet loss situations and then a bit about how QUIC can solve some of that and what QUIC is and when we might see the first experiments coming with IETF-QUIC – which really isn’t the same as Google-QUIC was.

To be honest, it is hard to deliver a talk in twenty minutes and I  was only 30 seconds over my time. I got questions and after the talk I spent a long time talking with people about HTTP, HTTP/2, QUIC, curl and the future of Internet protocols and transports. Very interesting.

The video of my talk can be seen, and the slides are online too.

I’m not sure if I was just unusually unlucky in my choices, or if there really was more people this year, but I experienced that “FULL” sign more than usual this year.

I fully intend to return again next year. Who knows, maybe I’ll figure out something to talk about then too. See you there?

Network, Security

QUIC is h2 over UDP

The third day of the QUIC interim passed and now that meeting has ended. It continued to work very well to attend from remote and the group manged to plow through an extensive set of issues. A lot of consensus was achieved and I personally now have a much better feel for the protocol and many of its details thanks to the many discussions.

The drafts are still a bit too early for us to start discussing inter-op for real. But there were mentions and hopes expressed that maybe maybe we might start to see some of that by mid 2017. When we did HTTP/2, we had about 10 different implementations by the time draft-04 was out. I suspect we will see a smaller set for QUIC simply because of it being much more complex.

The next interim is planned to occur in the beginning of June in Europe.

There is an official QUIC logo being designed, but it is not done yet so you still need to imagine one placed here.

QUIC needs HTTP/2 needs HTTP/1

QUIC is primarily designed to send and receive HTTP/2 frames and entire streams over UDP (not only, but this is where the bulk of the work has been put in so far). Sure, TLS encrypted and everything, but my point here is that it is being designed to transfer HTTP/2 frames. You remember how HTTP/2 is “just a new framing” layer that changes how HTTP is sent over the wire, but when “decoded” again in the receiving end it is in most important aspects still HTTP/1 there. You have to implement most of a HTTP/1 stack in order to support HTTP/2. Now QUIC adds another layer to that. QUIC is a new way to send HTTP/2 frames over the network.

A QUIC stack needs to handle most aspects of HTTP/2!

Of course, there are notable differences and changes to some underlying principles that makes QUIC a bit different. It isn’t exactly HTTP/2 over secure UDP. Let me give you a few examples…

Streams are more independent

Packets sent over the wire with UDP are independent from each other to a very large degree. In order to avoid Head-of-Line blocking (HoL), packets that are lost and re-transmitted will only block the particular streams to which the lost packets belong. The other streams can keep flowing, unaware and uncaring.

Thanks to the nature of the Internet and how packets are handled, it is not unusual for network packets to arrive in a slightly different order than they were sent, even when they aren’t exactly “lost”.

So, streams in HTTP/2 were entirely synced and the order the sender of frames use, will be the exact same order in which the frames arrive in the other end. Packet loss or not.

In QUIC, individual frames and entire streams may arrive in the receiver in a different order than what was used in the sender.

Stream ID gaps means open

When receiving a QUIC packet, there’s basically no way to know if there are packets missing that were intended to arrive but got lost and haven’t yet been re-transmitted.

If a frame is received that uses the new stream ID N (a stream not previously seen), the receiver is then forced to assume that all the other streams ID from our previously highest ID to N are all just missing and will arrive soon. They are then presumed to exist!

In HTTP/2, we could handle gaps in stream IDs much differently because of TCP. Then a gap is known to be deliberate.

Some h2 frames are done by QUIC

Since QUIC is designed with streams, flow control and more and is used to send HTTP/2 frames over them, some of the h2 frames aren’t needed but are instead handled by the transport layer within QUIC and won’t show up in the HTTP/2 layer.

HPACK goes QPACK?

HPACK is the header compression system used in HTTP/2. Among other things it features a dictionary that you manipulate with instructions and then subsequent header frames can refer to those dictionary indexes instead of sending the full header. Header frame one says “insert my user-agent string” and then header frame two can refer back to the index in the dictionary for where that identical user-agent string is stored.

Due to the out of order streams in QUIC, this dictionary treatment is harder. The second header frame could arrive before the first, so if it would refer to an index set in the first header frame, it would have to block the entire stream until that first header arrives.

HPACK also has a concept of just adding things to the dictionary without specifying the index, and since both sides are in perfect sync it works just fine. In QUIC, if we want to maintain the independence of streams and avoid blocking to the highest degree, we need to instead specify exact indexes to use and not assume perfect sync.

This (and more) are reasons why QPACK is being suggested as a replacement for HPACK when HTTP/2 header frames are sent over QUIC.

Mozilla, Network

First QUIC interim – in Tokyo

The IETF working group QUIC has its first interim meeting in Tokyo Japan for three days. Day one is today, January 24th 2017.

As I’m not there physically, I attend the meeting from remote using the webex that’s been setup for this purpose, and I’ll drop in a little screenshot below from one of the discussions (click it for hires) to give you a feel for it. It shows the issue being discussed and the camera view of the room in Tokyo. I run the jabber client on a different computer which allows me to also chat with the other participants. It works really well, both audio and video are quite crisp and understandable.

Japan is eight hours ahead of me time zone wise, so this meeting  runs from 01:30 until 09:30 Central European Time. That’s less comfortable and it may cause me some troubles to attend the entire thing.

On QUIC

We started off at once with a lot of discussions on basic issues. Versioning and what a specific version actually means and entails. Error codes and how error codes should be used within QUIC and its different components. Should the transport level know about priorities or shouldn’t it? How is the security protocol decided?

Everyone who is following the QUIC issues on github knows that there are plenty of people with a lot of ideas and thoughts on these matters and this meeting shows this impression is real.

For a casual bystander, you might’ve been fooled into thinking that because Google already made and deployed QUIC, these issues should be if not already done and decided, at least fairly speedily gone over. But nope. I think there are plenty of indications already that the protocol outputs that will come in the end of this process, the IETF QUIC will differ from the Google QUIC in a fair number of places.

The plan is that the different QUIC drafts (there are at least 4 different planned RFCs as they’re divided right now) should all be “done” during 2018.

(At 4am, the room took lunch and I wrote this up.)

cURL and libcurl, Network, Open Source

My talks at FOSDEM 2017

I couldn’t even recall how many times I’ve done this already, but in 2017 I am once again showing up in the cold and grey city called Brussels and the lovely FOSDEM conference, to talk. (Yes, it is cold and grey every February, trust me.) So I had to go back and count, and it turns out 2017 will become my 8th straight visit to FOSDEM and I believe it is the 5th year I’ll present there.First, a reminder about what I talked about at FOSDEM 2016: An HTTP/2 update. There’s also a (rather low quality) video recording of the talk to see there.

I’m scheduled for two presentations in 2017, and this year I’m breaking new ground for myself as I’m doing one of them on the “main track” which is the (according to me) most prestigious track held in one of the biggest rooms – seating more than 1,400 persons.

You know what’s cool? Running on billions of devices

Room: Janson, time: Saturday 14:00

Thousands of contributors help building the curl software which runs on several billions of devices and are affecting every human in the connected world daily. How this came to happen, who contributes and how Daniel at the wheel keeps it all together. How a hacking ring is actually behind it all and who funds this entire operation.

So that was HTTP/2, what’s next?

Room: UD2.218A, time: Saturday 16:30

A shorter recap on what HTTP/2 brought that HTTP/1 couldn’t offer before we dig in and look at some numbers that show how HTTP/2 has improved (browser) networking and the web experience for people.

Still, there are scenarios where HTTP/1’s multiple connections win over HTTP/2 in performance tests. Why is that and what is being done about it? Wasn’t HTTP/2 supposed to be the silver bullet?

A closer look at QUIC, its promises to fix the areas where HTTP/2 didn’t deliver and a check on where it is today. Is QUIC perhaps actually HTTP/3 in everything but the name?

Depending on what exactly happens in this area over time until FOSDEM, I will spice it up with more details on how we work on these protocol things in Mozilla/Firefox.

This will become my 3rd year in a row that I talk in the Mozilla devroom to present the state of the HTTP protocol and web transport.

Network, Web

A third day of deep HTTP inspection

The workshop roomThis fine morning started off with some news: Patrick is now our brand new official co-chair of the IETF HTTPbis working group!

Subodh then sat down and took us off on a presentation that really triggered a long and lively discussion. “Retry safety extensions” was his name of it but it involved everything from what browsers and HTTP clients do for retrying with no response and went on to also include replaying problems for 0-RTT protocols such as TLS 1.3.

Julian did a short presentation on http headers and his draft for JSON in new headers and we quickly fell down a deep hole of discussions around various formats with ups and downs on them all. The general feeling seems to be that JSON will not be a good idea for headers in spite of a couple of good characteristics, partly because of its handling of duplicate field entries and how it handles or doesn’t handle numerical precision (ie you can send “100” as a monstrously large floating point number).

Mike did a presentation he called “H2 Regrets” in which he covered his work on a draft for support of client certs which was basically forbidden due to h2’s ban of TLS renegotiation, he brought up the idea of extended settings and discussed the lack of special handling dates in HTTP headers (why we send 29 bytes instead of 4). Shows there are improvements to be had in the future too!

Martin talked to us about Blind caching and how the concept of this works. Put very simply: it is a way to make it possible to offer cached content for clients using HTTPS, by storing the data in a 3rd host and pointing out that data to the client. There was a lengthy discussion around this and I think one of the outstanding questions is if this feature is really giving as much value to motivate the rather high cost in complexity…

The list of remaining Lightning Talks had grown to 10 talks and we fired them all off at a five minutes per topic pace. I brought up my intention and hope that we’ll do a QUIC library soon to experiment with. I personally particularly enjoyed EKR’s TLS 1.3 status summary. I heard appreciation from others and I agree with this that the idea to feature lightning talks was really good.

With this, the HTTP Workshop 2016 was officially ended. There will be a survey sent out about this edition and what people want to do for the next/future ones, and there will be some sort of  report posted about this event from the organizers, summarizing things.

Attendees numbers

http workshopThe companies with most attendees present here were: Mozilla 5, Google 4, Facebook, Akamai and Apple 3.

The attendees were from the following regions of the world: North America 19, Europe 15, Asia/pacific 6.

38 participants were male and 2 female.

23 of us were also at the 2015 workshop, 17 were newcomers.

15 people did lightning talks.

I believe 40 is about as many as you can put in a single room and still have discussions. Going larger will make it harder to make yourself heard as easily and would probably force us to have to switch to smaller groups more and thus not get this sort of great dynamic flow. I’m not saying that we can’t do this smaller or larger, just that it would have to make the event different.

Some final words

I had an awesome few days and I loved all of it. It was a pleasure organizing this and I’m happy that Stockholm showed its best face weather wise during these days. I was also happy to hear that so many people enjoyed their time here in Sweden. The hotel and its facilities, including food and coffee etc worked out smoothly I think with no complaints at all.

Hope to see again on the next HTTP Workshop!

Network, Web

Workshop day two

2 Comments

HTTP Workshop At 5pm we rounded off another fully featured day at the HTTP workshop. Here’s some of what we touched on today:

Moritz started the morning with an interesting presentation about experiments with running the exact same site and contents on h1 vs h2 over different kinds of networks, with different packet loss scenarios and with different ICWND set and more. Very interesting stuff. If he makes his presentation available at some point I’ll add a link to it.

I then got the honor to present the state of the TCP Tuning draft (which I’ve admittedly been neglecting a bit lately), the slides are here. I made it brief but I still got some feedback and in general this is a draft that people seem to agree is a good idea – keep sending me your feedback and help me improve it. I just need to pull myself together now and move it forward. I tried to be quick to leave over to…

Jana, who was back again to tell us about QUIC and the state of things in that area. His presentation apparently was a subset of slides he presented last week in the Berlin IETF. One interesting take-away for me, was that they’ve noticed that the amount of connections for which they detect UDP rate limiting on, has decreased with 2/3 during the last year!

Here’s my favorite image from his slide set. Apparently TCP/2 is not a name for QUIC that everybody appreciates! 😉

call-it-tcp2-one-more-time

While I think the topic of QUIC piqued the interest of most people in the room and there were a lot of questions, thoughts and ideas around the topic we still managed to get the lunch break pretty much in time and we could run off and have another lovely buffet lunch. There’s certainly no risk for us loosing weight during this event…

After lunch we got ourselves a series of Lightning talks presented for us. Seven short talks on various subjects that people had signed up to do

One of the lightning talks that stuck with me was what I would call the idea about an extended Happy Eyeballs approach that I’d like to call Even Happier Eyeballs: make the client TCP connect to all IPs in a DNS response and race them against each other and use the one that responds with a SYN-ACK first. There was interest expressed in the room to get this concept tested out for real in at least one browser.

We then fell over into the area of HTTP/3 ideas and what the people in the room think we should be working on for that. It turned out that the list of stuff we created last year at the workshop was still actually a pretty good list and while we could massage that a bit, it is still mostly the same as before.

Anne presented fetch and how browsers use HTTP. Perhaps a bit surprising that soon brought us over into the subject of trailers, how to support that and voilá, in the end we possibly even agreed that we should perhaps consider handling them somehow in browsers and even for javascript APIs… ( nah, curl/libcurl doesn’t have any particular support for trailers, but will of course get that if we’ll actually see things out there start to use it for real)

I think we deserved a few beers after this day! The final workshop day is tomorrow.