Application Network Performance Tunnig

This post shares some the factors that need to be considered while designing an application that is going to be accessed using a network having high latencies and low bandwidth. The post will also look at some of the important TCP level tuning factors.

Symptom

The application works well when accessed from some locations and from some other locations its very slow.

Possible causes

Network Issues

• Network is having high latency
• Bandwidth is very narrow
• Packet loss is high

Application design related

• Multiple calls to server

During design itself avoid using multiple server calls to fulfill a business process.
From the client issue a single call to the server and let the server do the processing and return the desired objects in this call.

• Unnecessary transfer of data

Re look your design/code and find out whether you are transmitting data that's not of
importance to the client. Reduce all unnecessary data transfer to the client.

• Sending large chunks of uncompressed data

Using different compression algorithms compress the data before sending to the client. Gzip

compression is a good option. But compression can be CPU intensive ; so the capacity planning should consider this factor also.

• Not Caching Master Data

Look at the possibility of caching the data that's not changed frequently.

TCP Related
TCP's slow start and congestion control issue :-

TCP starts a session by sending two packets at a time and waiting for acknowledgment.TCP increases its connection window one packet at a time until it receives congestion signal.when it recognizes a congestion signal;it reduces the current send window size to half and then resumes additive increase.This increase happens one packet at time until congestion window equals advertisedWindow or a till a congestion signal is received.

This TCP behavior results in an oscillating send window and it affect the effective utilized capacity of a TCP connection. Large TCP Advertised window is an option to tune this behavior.
This better done by an OS expert.

TCP Window Size:-

TCP has a window of packets that can be in flight from one network end to another.If the window is full ; the sender cannot send additional packets until the destination acknowledges the receipt of some of the already sent packets. Since on a high latency network the acknowledgment takes a long time to come; the transmission from the sender is halted when the window is full until ack comes for the packets already send. This can be a problem.
The possible solution is to increase the TCP window size. The default value of this is 64 KB.
A lot of optimizations on this TCP behavior is done at the OS level in many new OS; like Windows Vista.