[sams99]

there is also http://www.fastsoft.com/home/ which professes to do the same, personally I worry about any non-documented non-public congestion control protocols, many years have been spent in the academia researching this subject ... it is easy to be "fastest" - just disable congestion control altogether - trouble is tons will break. In order for me to use a different congestion control algorithm in production I would need some experts to review the protocol to ensure I am being a good web citizen and not breaking the internet.

[hristov]

That is the initial reaction of most people. But it is not the case actually. If you disable congestion control, you will be the fastest for a little bit (maybe a hundred miliseconds) and then you will get drowned in dropped packets. In other words, you will be sending data fast but packets will start dropping on the way, so the data will not be received fast.

When we say we are the fastest, I mean we are the fastest at sending packets all the way through. This is not easy at all, and it is not as simple as sending packets as fast as possible.

We are very good at modulating our speed in order to have full speed while avoiding dropped packets. Thus, in many situations, we send data slower than other TCP versions but the other versions get into trouble and start dropping packets.

There is one universal rule for TCP congestion avoidance algorithms and that is that as soon as you notice a dropped packet, you have to stop and wait for the congestion to clear up. If you do not do that, you will break the internet. But we do follow that rule; furthermore, we avoid large numbers of dropped packets in the first place.

We have tested our software with other standard connections and it does play well with others.

As someone else noted, Fastsoft are respected by the industry and it is well established that they do not break the internet. We are about 30% faster than fastsoft.

[youngtaff]

Fastsoft have a good reputation amongst web performance people