Impact of TCP Loss on Regional Application Performance

Content providers deploy serving infrastructure around the globe to provide low latency endpoints and caching services that are critical for good user experience. Despite efforts to improve performance by pushing content and infrastructure close to users, performance in many regions of the world still lags far behind what is observed in North America and Europe. Poor performance can result from excessive TCP loss, so understanding regional loss characteristics is a critical step toward addressing regional performance issues that degrade user experience and prevent a uniform global experience. In this work, we examine regional characteristics of TCP loss and how they impact performance in different application workloads. Our analysis of four production applications in four countries quantify how regional differences in loss behavior contribute to differences in regional application performance.