Improving HTTP performance using "stateless" TCP

Abstract

TCP is quite a heavyweight protocol when serving very small web pages. We introduce a server-side kernel modification which enables a web server to perform HTTP over a UDP socket while the kernel provides a regular TCP interface 'on the wire' to remote clients. We show that our "stateless" TCP modification can greatly reduce a server's CPU usage (>20%) and TCP related memory requirements(>90%), potentially enabling it to serve small web pages even under extreme overload conditions.