Ben Strong writes:
I decided a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to build an app, most likely a web app. Being a premature optimizer by nature, my first order of business (after deciding I need to learn to draw) was to find the absolute fastest way to serve up a web page. The Google home page is the fastest-loading page I know of, so I thought a good place to start would be to figure out how they do it and then replicate their strategy.
The full story of my search is below, but the short version is that to match Google’s page load times you have to cheat on the tcp slow-start algorithm. It appears that stretching the parameters a little bit is fairly common, but Google and Microsoft push it a lot further than most. This may well be common knowledge in web development circles, but it was news to me.
Via Slashdot:
“Software developer and blogger Ben Strong did a little exploring to find out how Google achieves its admirably fast load times. What he discovered is that Google, and to a much greater extent Microsoft, are cheating on the ‘slow-start’ requirement of RFC-3390. His research indicates that discussion of this practice on the Net is at an early, and somewhat theoretical, stage. Strong concludes with this question: ‘What should I do in my app (and what should you do in yours)? Join the arms race or sit on the sidelines and let Google have all the page-load glory?'”
See also:
- Request for Comments 3390: “Increasing TCP’s Initial Window”
- Network congestion avoidance @ Wikipedia
