goquic, QUIC support for Go

This is a work-in-progress QUIC implementation for Go. This is based on libquic library, which is in turn based on original QUIC implementation on Chromium.

QUIC is an experimental protocol aimed at reducing web latency over that of TCP. On the surface, QUIC is very similar to TCP+TLS+SPDY implemented on UDP. Because TCP is implement in operating system kernels, and middlebox firmware, making significant changes to TCP is next to impossible. However, since QUIC is built on top of UDP, it suffers from no such limitations.

Key features of QUIC over existing TCP+TLS+SPDY include

• Dramatically reduced connection establishment time
• Improved congestion control
• Multiplexing without head of line blocking
• Forward error correction
• Connection migration

Project Status

This library is highly experimental. Although libquic sources are from Chromium (which are tested), the Go bindings are still highly pre-alpha state.

Known issues:

• No support for read streaming. All request must fit in memory.
• Secure QUIC not fully tested. May not support ECDSA certificates.

Things to do:

• Read streaming support

Preliminary Benchmarks

A very primitive benchmark testing have been done. Testing environments below:

The server code is modified to create 30B, 1kB, 5kB, 10kB HTTP body payload. Concurrency is 200 and each thread requests 1,000 requests. It is designed to measure ideal throughput of the server. Naturally the throughput goes down when concurrency increases.

Benchmark results:

On 10kB case, calculating the total network throughput is 458Mbps.

How many connections per second can this server process?

./gobench -u="https://example.com:9090/" -c 200 -r 100 -qk=false

Turning off keepalive using qk option results in a pure new QUIC connection per request. The benchmark results are 2905.58 CPS.

Getting Started

Get source files

go get -u -d github.com/devsisters/goquic

-u option is needed, because building (or downloading) static libraries is necessary for building and installing goquic library.

Build static library files

Although prebuilt static library files already exists in the repository for convenience, it is always good practice to build library files from source. You should not trust any unverifiable third-party binaries.

To build the library files for your architecture and OS:

./build_libs.sh (for debug build)
GOQUIC_BUILD=Release ./build_libs.sh (for release build)

This will fetch libquic master and build all the binaries from source. The C/C++ files for Go bindings will be all built too.

To build static library files, you should have cmake, C/C++ compiler, and ninja-build system (or GNU make).

Currently Linux, Mac OS X and FreeBSD is supported.

How to build

If you are using Go >= 1.5, you can build goquic binaries without any extra work.

go build $GOPATH/src/github.com/devsisters/goquic/example/server.go

If you are using Go 1.4, you should open goquic.go and manually edit ${SRCDIR} with your real path (maybe /YOUR/GOPATH/src/github.com/devsisters/goquic).

SPDY/QUIC support

We have a experimental SPDY/QUIC implementation as a library. You can use this library to add SPDY/QUIC support for your existing Go HTTP server.

See our SPDY-QUIC server/client implementation here.

How to use server

When running a HTTP server, do:

goquic.ListenAndServe(":8080", 1, nil)

instead of

http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)

How to use client

You need to create http.Client with Transport changed, do:

client := &http.Client{
	Transport: goquic.NewRoundTripper(false),
}
resp, err := client.Get("http://example.com/")

instead of

resp, err := http.Get("http://example.com/")