Research

We examine the current state of user network performance and opportunities to improve it from the vantage point of Facebook, a global content provider. Facebook serves over 2 billion users distributed around the world using a network of PoPs and interconnections spread across 6 continents. In this paper, we execute a large-scale, 10-day measurement study of metrics at the TCP and HTTP layers for production user traffic at all of Facebook’s PoPs worldwide, collecting performance measurements for hundreds of trillions of sampled HTTP sessions. We discuss our approach to collecting and analyzing measurements, including a novel approach to characterizing user achievable goodput from the server side. We find that most user sessions have MinRTT less than 39ms and can support HD video. We investigate if it is possible to improve performance by incorporating performance information into Facebook’s routing decisions; we find that default routing by Facebook is largely optimal. To our knowledge, our measurement study is the first characterization of user performance on today’s Internet from the vantage point of a global content provider.