This paper delves into the impact of QUIC on web application performance over high-speed networks. Surprisingly, the study reveals that the UDP+QUIC+HTTP/3 stack can experience up to a 45.2% data rate reduction compared to TCP+TLS+HTTP/2. This performance gap widens with increasing bandwidth, affecting applications like video streaming (up to 9.8% bitrate reduction) and web browsing. The root cause is linked to high receiver-side processing overhead, especially due to excessive data packets and QUIC’s user-space ACKs. The paper offers practical recommendations to address these performance issues, making it a valuable resource for network optimization.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589334.3645323