Over 75% of Facebook’s traffic uses QUIC and HTTP/3

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Facebook announced on October 21 that they are replacing the de facto protocol the internet has used for decades with QUIC. Today, more than 75% of Facebook’s Internet traffic uses QUIC and HTTP/3. Facebook refers to the two collectively as QUIC and believes that QUIC has significant improvements over the old protocol in many aspects, including request errors, tail delays, and response header size.

QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) is a project launched by Google, which aims to reduce the web delay based on TCP communication and replace the transmission control protocol TCP in a broad sense. QUIC is very similar to TCP+TLS+SPDY but based on UDP. It is the basic protocol of HTTP/3. A few days ago, Chromium officially announced that Chrome is deploying to HTTP/3 and IETF QUIC.

Facebook said that their first goal of using QUIC on the Internet was the Facebook application, and they also experimented with this. The experiment enabled QUIC for dynamic GraphQL requests in the Facebook application, which contained no static content.

The test results show that compared with HTTP/2, QUIC reduced the request errors of people on Facebook by 6%, the tail waits time by 20%, and the response header size by 5%. This also has a knock-on effect on other indicators, indicating that QUIC greatly improves people’s experience.
In the next step, Facebook plans to deploy QUIC for static content in its applications. In the future, Facebook plans to continue to utilize more existing features of QUIC, such as connection migration and true 0-RTT connection establishment, as well as improvements in congestion control and loss recovery.

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