It’s Time To Replace TCP In The Datacenter
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Despite its long and successful history, TCP is ill-suited for modern datacenters. Every significant element of TCP, from its stream orientation to its expectation of in-order packet delivery, is inadequate for the datacenter environment. The fundamental issues with TCP are too interrelated to be fixed incrementally; the only way to harness the full performance potential of modern networks is to introduce a new transport protocol. Homa, a novel transport protocol, demonstrates that it is possible to avoid all of TCP's problems. Although Homa is not API-compatible with TCP, it can be integrated with RPC frameworks to bring it into widespread usage.
TCP, designed in the late 1970s, has been phenomenally successful and adaptable. Originally created for a network with about 100 hosts and link speeds of tens of kilobits per second, TCP has scaled to billions of hosts and link speeds of 100 Gbit/second or more. However, datacenter computing presents unprecedented challenges for TCP. With millions of cores in close proximity and applications harnessing thousands of machines interacting on microsecond timescales, TCP's performance is suboptimal. TCP introduces overheads that limit application-level performance, contributing significantly to the "datacenter tax."
This position paper argues that TCP's challenges in the datacenter are insurmountable. Each major design decision in TCP is wrong for the datacenter, leading to significant negative consequences. These problems impact systems at multiple levels, including the network, kernel software, and applications. For instance, TCP interferes with load balancing, a critical aspect of datacenter operations.
[...] TCP's key properties, including stream orientation, connection orientation, bandwidth sharing, sender-driven congestion control, and in-order packet delivery, are all wrong for datacenter transport. Each of these decisions has serious negative consequences:
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