VKontakte was one of the first in the world to introduce advanced data transmission technology based on the new QUIC Internet protocol and doubled the speed of content delivery in the web version and mobile applications. The technical director of VKontakte Alexander Tobol told about this at the Saint HighLoad ++ conference in St. Petersburg, where he, together with the team on September 20, presents the details of the update. Now content consumption at high speed will be possible without loss of quality, even with a weak Internet connection and unstable mobile networks.
The multimillion-dollar audience of VKontakte is users from different parts of Russia and the world. The introduction of the new protocol made it possible to halve the delivery time of content in all regions and around the world: users will be able to quickly exchange photos, text messages and comments, music, and update the news feed. Unstable Internet or low device performance will not interfere with communicating with friends and acquaintances: in the subway, while traveling, in the mountains, in the country or in the forest – the application will work much faster.
Thanks to the introduction of the new VKontakte protocol, content delivery time has decreased by 55%, and the total number of events viewed daily has grown by more than 250 million. Content delivery has doubled, and in bad networks, users began to consume 10% more content. The application with the new network technology was tested and showed a multiple increase in speed not only in Russia, but also in a number of other countries, including Germany, Brazil and Moldova.
The new transport protocol differs from the widely used protocol of the old generation TCP: QUIC has reduced latency when transferring different types of content, adaptability to increased traffic volumes and built-in modern technologies to ensure data reliability. Among its differences is also the transmission of information on the network exclusively in encrypted form – this increases the security of the exchange of data by the audience of the social network.
At the moment, the industry does not have a ready-made set of solutions for both the client and the server required to implement and support the new protocol in high-load systems. Therefore, not all companies can quickly transfer services to QUIC. The VKontakte team made their developments on the support of the new generation network technology on the clients and the server open to the public, which was also announced during the conference.
The change in protocol will allow the technical team of VKontakte to quickly make changes to the operation of the application at the network level and quickly adapt to external conditions. New QUIC network technologies will optimize traffic consumption and minimize errors in requests, speed up data transfer and reduce latency.
Alexander Tobol, technical director of VKontakte:
“The introduction of the new generation QUIC protocol allowed us to speed up the delivery of content to the user twice, and in bad networks – four times. Quick user access to content is our key goal, so the transition to QUIC was a logical and strategic step. This network technology brings many innovations at the transport level and opens up for us in the future the possibility of creating new content delivery algorithms and network optimizations – my team and I will continue to speed up VKontakte. By making our implementation of QUIC support publicly available to all developers, we are making the web even faster. “
