Peace, On Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 4:40 PM Nick Banks <[email protected]> wrote:
> You should definitely not make any assumptions around having unique source > ports for QUIC connections. > Ephemeral port randomization-based traffic balancing is not what I assume, it's what, maybe, half the Internet connectivity providers do for a decade. RFC 6438 kinda sums it up, and I urge you to read it. To distribute the load across multiple paths, an Internet router needs an entropy source providing a random integer stable for a connection (if you want to avoid delays and retries), generally different for different connections (if you want to avoid seeing all the connections congested on a single paths), available for reading in every packet. Now, that's the ephemeral source port. Compared to a protocol X which ditches the ephemeral port, TCP would probably work faster and more reliable along a lot of the network paths, because it won't be always taking paths already congested by the protocol X. That, of course, assumes the protocol X is popular. Many VPN protocols also suffer from that but their general (negligible) Internet-scale adoption state kinda saves the day. For the HTTP protocol that would be different. This doesn't necessarily mean all connections would be on the same source > port, but only a few ports might be used for all connections. > *That* *might* work but the fixed source port won't. -- Töma >
