What is the time consumed in order to open a TCP socket with remote server? For example, in C, How long does it take from the time of calling connect() function until the time it returns with 0?
What are the factors affecting this time?
The major factor affecting this is the time needed for the initial TCP handshake which mostly depends on how far away (in terms on network, i.e hops and duration) the peer is. Other factors like performance of the system are mostly irrelevant as long as neither client nor server starving on resources (i.e. DOS attack).
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I'm look recommendations on how to achieve low latency for the following network protocol:
Alice sends out a request for information to many peers selected at random from a very large pool.
Each peer responds with a small packet <20kb.
Alice aggregates the responses and selects a peer accordingly.
Alice and the selected peer then continue to the second phase of the protocol whereby a sequence of 2 requests and responses are performed.
Repeat from 1.
Given that steps 1 and 2 do not need to be reliable (as long as a percentage of responses arrive back we proceed to step 3) and that 1 is essentially a multicast, this part of the protocol seems to suit UDP - setting up a TCP connection to these peers would add an addition round trip.
However step 4 needs to be reliable - we can't tolerate packet loss during the subsequent requests/responses.
The conundrum I'm facing is that UDP suits 1 and 2 and TCP protocol suits 4. Connecting to every peer selected in 1 is slow especially since we aim to transmit just 20kb, however UDP cannot be tolerated for step 4. Handshaking the peer selected in 4. would require an additional round trip, which compared to the 3 round trips still is a considerable increase in total time.
Is there some hybrid scheme whereby you can do a TCP handshake while transmitting a small amount of data? (The handshake could be merged into 1 and 2 and hence doesn't add any additional round trip time.)
Is there a name for such protocols? What should I read to become more acquainted with such problems?
Additional info:
Participants are assumed to be randomly distributed around the globe and connected via the internet.
The pool selected from in step 1. is on the order of 1000 addresses and the the sample from the pool on the order of 10 to 100.
There's not enough detail here to do a well-informed criticism. If you were hiring me for advice, I'd want to know a lot more about the proposal, but since I'm doing this for free, I'll just answer the question as asked, and try to make it practical rather than ideal.
I'd argue that UDP is not suitable for the early part of your protocol. You can't just multicast a single packet to a large number of hosts on the Internet (although you can do it on typical LANs). A 20KB payload is not the sort of thing you can generally transmit in a single datagram in any case, and the moment messages fail to fit in a single datagram, UDP loses most of its attraction, because you start reinventing TCP (badly).
Probably the simplest thing you can do is base your system on HTTP, and work with implementations which incorporate all the various speed-ups that Google (mostly) has been putting into HTTP development. This includes TCP Fast Open, and things like it. Initiate connections out to your chosen servers; some will respond faster than others: use that to your advantage by going with the quickest ones. Don't underestimate the importance of efficient implementation relative to theoretical round-trip time, by the way.
For stage two, continue with HTTP as before. For efficiency, you could hold all the connections open at the end of phase one and then close all the ones except your chosen phase two partner. It's not clear from your description that the phase two exchange lends itself to the HTTP model, though, so I have to hand-wave this a bit.
It's also possible that you can simply hold TCP connections open to all available peers more or less permanently, thus dodging the cost of connection establishment nearly all the time. A thousand simultaneous open connections is large, but not outrageous in most contexts (although you may need to tweak OS settings to allow it). If you do that, you can just talk whatever protocol you like over TCP. If it's a truly peer-to-peer protocol, you only need one TCP connection per pair. Implementing this kind of thing is tricky, though: an average programmer will do a terrible job of it, in my experience.
I'm curious about if there is some type of standard limit on when is better to use Ajax Polling instead of SSE, from a server side viewpoint.
1 request every second: I'm pretty sure is better SSE
1 request per minute: I'm pretty sure is better Ajax
But what about 1 request every 5 seconds? How can we calculate where is the limit frequency for Ajax or SSE?
No way is 1 request per minute always better for Ajax, so that assumption is flawed from the start. Any kind of frequent polling is nearly always a costly choice. It seems from our previous conversation in comments of another question that you start with a belief that an open TCP socket (whether SSE connection or webSocket connection) is somehow costly to server performance. An idle TCP connection takes zero CPU (maybe every once in a long while, a keep alive might be sent, but other than that, an idle socket does not use CPU). It does use a bit of server memory to handle the socket descriptor, but a highly tuned server can have 1,000,000 open sockets at once. So, your CPU usage is going to be more about how many connections are being established and what are they asking the server to do every time they are established than it is about how many open (and mostly idle) connections there are.
Remember, every http connection has to create a TCP socket (which is roundtrips between client/server), then send the http request, then get the http response, then close the socket. That's a lot of roundtrips of data to do every minute. If the connection is https, it's even more work and roundtrips to establish the connection because of the crypto layer and endpoint certification. So doing all that every minute for hundreds of thousands of clients seems like a massive waste of resources and bandwidth when you could create one SSE connection and the client just listen for data to stream from the server over that connection.
As I said in our earlier comment exchange on a different question, these types of questions are not really answerable in the abstract. You have to have specific requirements of both client and server and a specific understanding of the data being delivered and how urgent it is on the client and therefore a specific polling interval and a specific scale in order to begin to do some calculations or test harnesses to evaluate which might be the more desirable way to do things. There are simply too many variables to come up with a purely hypothetical answer. You have to define a scenario and then analyze different implementations for that specific scenario.
Number of requests per second is only one of many possible variables. For example, if most the time you poll there's actually nothing new, then that gives even more of an advantage to the SSE case because it would have nothing to do at all (zero load on the server other than a little bit of memory used for an open socket most of the time) whereas the polling creates continual load, even when nothing to do.
The #1 advantage to server push (whether implement with SSE or webSocket) is that the server only has to do anything with the client when there is actually pertinent data to send to that specific client. All the rest of the time, the socket is just sitting there idle (perhaps occasionally on a long interval, sending a keep-alive).
The #1 disadvantage to polling is that there may be lots of times that the client is polling the server and the server has to expend resources to deal with the polling request only to inform that client that it has nothing new.
How can we calculate where is the limit frequency for Ajax or SSE?
It's a pretty complicated process. Lots of variables in a specific scenario need to be defined. It's not as simple as just requests/sec. Then, you have to decide what you're attempting to measure or evaluate and at what scale? "Server performance" is the only thing you mention, but that has to be completely defined and different factors such as CPU usage and memory usage have to be weighted into whatever you're measuring or calculating. Then, you may even need to run some test harnesses if the calculations don't yield an obvious answer or if the decision is so critical that you want to verify your calculations with real metrics.
It sounds like you're looking for an answer like "at greater than x requests/min, you should use polling instead of SSE" and I don't think there is an answer that simple. It depends upon far more things than requests/min or requests/sec.
"Polling" incurs overhead on all parties. If you can avoid it, don't poll.
If SSE is an option, it might be a good choice. "It depends".
Q: What (if any) kind of "event(s)" will your app need to handle?
We have a TCP connection.
Nothing is sent over; how many traffic(bytes) are needed for each second to keep that connection open?
What is the duration of opening a connection from a client in South America to a server in North Europe?
If I have to send small amount of data (max 256bytes) at x seconds interval, what would be x for which is better to close the connection and reopen again instead of keeping the connection always open?
I do not expect exact data - estimates will suffice.
1) none.
2) some time. Try it and see. For a rough estimate, ping one end from the other and double it.
3) try it. It depends on bandwidth and, more importantly, latency. These vary over wide ranges. Usually, it's better, speed-wise, to keep connections open. 256 bytes at intervals of seconds? I would keep the connection open, especially over paths with possibly high latency, (eg. intercontinental).
1. According to the TCP/IP standard, nothing. However, depending on the network conditions and any middleboxes (NAT devices, firewalls, etc.), a connection with no data going over it may be dropped. That could be a staic timeout (say two minutes, or ten minutes, or an hour), or it could be based on a least-recently-used table in some device.
2. It depends on a lot of factors, and the biggest delay may be from the client's local network rather than the intercontinental connection. However, the surface of the earth between the points is about 40 light-millisenconds, so (without TCP Fast Open) that would be 120 ms for the first data packet to get from the client to the server and 40 ms for the response, 80 ms more than in an active connection.
3. Assuming no broken middleboxes, always better to keep the connection open. However, the delay to recover from a "silently dropped" connection may be a lot longer than the time to open a new one; it might be appropriate for the client to manage its own timeout (on hte order of a second or so), and open a new connection and retry the last message if it hasn't gotten a response by then. Depends on what you're sending; transactional messages might merit such explicit fast retry more than a remote copy of syslog.
I'd like to know the general cost of creating a new connection, compared to UDP. I know TCP requires an initial exchange of packets (the 3 way handshake). What would be other costs? For instance is there some sort of magic in the kernel needed for setting up buffers etc?
The reason I'm asking is I can keep an existing connection open and reuse it as needed. However if there is little overhead reconnecting it would reduce complexity.
Once a UDP packet's been dumped onto the wire, the UDP protocol stack is free to completely forget about it. With TCP, there's at bare minimum the connection details (source/dest port and source/dest IP), the sequence number, the window size for the connection etc... It's not a huge amount of data, but adds up quickly on a busy server with many connections.
And then there's the 3-way handshake as well. Some braindead (and/or malicious systems) can abuse the process (look up 'syn flood'), or just drop the connection on their end, leaving your system waiting for a response or close notice that'll never come. The plus side is that with TCP the system will do its best to make sure the packet gets where it has to. With UDP, there's no guarantees at all.
Compared to the latency of the packet exchange, all other costs such as kernel setup times are insignificant.
OPTION 1: The general cost of creating a TCP connection are:
Create socket connection
Send data
Tear down socket connection
Step 1: Requires an exchange of packets, so it's delayed by to & from network latency plus the destination server's service time. No significant CPU usage on either box is involved.
Step 2: Depends on the size of the message.
Step 3: IIRC, just sends a 'closing now' packet, w/ no wait for destination ack, so no latency involved.
OPTION 2: Costs of UDP:*
Create UDP object
Send data
Close UDP object
Step 1: Requires minimal setup, no latency worries, very fast.
Step 2: BE CAREFUL OF SIZE, there is no retransmit in UDP since it doesn't care if the packet was received by anyone or not. I've heard that the larger the message, the greater probability of data being received corrupted, and that a rule of thumb is that you'll lose a certain percentage of messages over 20 MB.
Step 3: Minimal work, minimal time.
OPTION 3: Use ZeroMQ Instead
You're comparing TCP to UDP with a goal of reducing reconnection time. THERE IS A NICE COMPROMISE: ZeroMQ sockets.
ZMQ allows you to set up a publishing socket where you don't care if anyone is listening (like UDP), and have multiple listeners on that socket. This is NOT a UDP socket - it's an alternative to both of these protocols.
See: ZeroMQ.org for details.
It's very high speed and fault tolerant, and is in increasing use in the financial industry for those reasons.
I would be greatful for help, understanding how long it takes to establish a TCP connection when I have the Ping RoundTripTip:
According to Wikipedia a TCP Connection will be established in three steps:
1.SYN-SENT (=>CLIENT TO SERVER)
2.SYN/ACK-RECEIVED (=>SERVER TO CLIENT)
3.ACK-SENT (=>CLIENT TO SERVER)
My Questions:
Is it correct, that the third transmission (ACK-SENT) will not yet carry any payload (my data) but is only used for the connection establishement.(This leads to the conclusion, that the fourth packt will be the first packt to hold any payload....)
Is it correct to assume, that when my Ping RoundTripTime is 20 milliseconds, that in the example given above, the TCP Connection establishment would at least require 30 millisecons, before any data can be transmitted between the Client and Server?
Thank you very much
Tom
Those things are basically correct, though #2 assumes that the round-trip time is symmetric.
To measure this, called the "Time to Syn/ACK" (which is NOT the Time to Establish a connection - the connection is only half-open when in that state, you need the 3rd packet acknowledging the establishment to consider it established), you usually need professional tools that include their own TCP stack, enabling that kind of measurement. The most used one is called the Spirent Avalanche, but you also have Ixia's IxLoad or BreakingPoint Systems box (BPS has now been acquired by Ixia btw).
Note that, yes, 3rd packet won't have any data, and that is also true of the first two. They are only Syn and Syn+Ack flagged (those are TCP flags), and contain no application data. This initial exchange, called the Three-way Handshake therefore causes some overhead, which is why TCP is typically not used in real-time applications (voice, live video, etc..).
Also as stated, you can't assume that Latency = RTT/2. It is in fact very complicated to measure one-way latency above layer 3 (IP) - and you are already at layer 4 (TCP) here. This blog post covers in details the challenge of this: http://synsynack.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/realistic-latency-measurement-in-the-application-layers/