Examining the Heterogeneous Throughput Performance Landscape of QUIC Implementations

QUIC, a UDP-based transport protocol that integrates TLS for security and reduces connection latency, has gained widespread adoption and is now underpinning a substantial share of data traffic for major platforms like Cloudflare, Google, andFacebook. Given its growing deployment across major Internet platforms, there is growing attention on the performance potential of QUIC implementations.
This paper provides an in-depth study of different QUIC implementations on a hardware testbed with 10 Gbit/s links. Our focus is on the achievable goodput in different scenarios and with different implementations. In contrast to other performance studies of QUIC, we investigated QUIC together with multiple versions of HTTP and used multiple streams for the data transfer. Our results show that merely choosing a different application protocol (i.e., HTTP/3 versus HTTP/0.9) can reduce goodput by as much as 27 %. Dedicated traffic generators can further significantly boost achievable goodput, in cases more than doubling the throughput obtained via HTTP. Moreover, our analysis reveals that increasing the number of QUIC streams may potentially double the throughput of multi-segment data transfers, depending on the implementation. ... mehrAdditionally, certain QUIC implementations can saturate a 10 Gbit/s link by increasing packet sizes, indicating that QUIC packet processing speed, rather than raw transmission capacity, is a primary bottleneck.
These findings highlight QUIC’s capabilities, limitations, and implementation heterogeneity. The differences between QUIC and QUIC+HTTP throughput emphasize the need for dedicated performance tests. Understanding these distinctions is crucial for analyzing, optimizing, and maximizing QUIC’s performance.