Evaluation of QUIC on web page performance

Abstract

This work presents the first study of a new protocol, QUIC, on Web page performance. Our experiments test the HTTP/1.1, SPDY, and QUIC multiplexing protocols on the Alexa U.S. Top 500 websites, across 100+ network configurations of bandwidth and round-trip time (both static links and cellular networks). To do so, we design and implement QuicShell, a tool for measuring QUIC's Web page performance accurately and reproducibly. Using QuicShell, we evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of QUIC. Due to its design of stream multiplexing over UDP, QUIC outperforms its predecessors over low-bandwidth links and high-delay links by 10 - 60%. It also helps Web pages with small objects and HTTPS-enabled Web pages. To improve QUIC's performance on cellular networks, we implement the Sprout-EWMA congestion control protocol and find that it improves QUIC's performance by > 10% on high-delay links.