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Comment by dgemm | Hacker News Reader

I have seen this software before. I suppose the speed boost results from using multiple parallel connections, meaning it could make better use of aggregate links and multipath networks? Is there anything else to it?

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Used a few of their products at a previous company. That's the gist of the protocol. It's UDP-based and the software has intelligence to use bandwidth as efficiently as possible between links. We had a few servers sending to many endpoints concurrently, and I'd regularly see the systems cap out their 10gbit connections.

License costs are pretty brutal and it does need decent amount CPU to make the most of it.

Are you able to recommend a resource for how to use bandwidth most efficiently like this? I'm interested in learning more, and would appreciate it. Also, might using raw sockets not offer better performance and lower CPU usage?

There is quite a bit of documentation on this particular snake oil: https://patents.justia.com/patent/20090063698

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_and_Secure_Protocol

What is it about it that makes it snake oil?

Looks like they are just throwing shade. It really does do what it says on the tin, it just costs too much for many uses.

It does what it says and it’s expensive. There’s a couple of commercial packages like this - two that come to mind are vcinity and Signiant. A solution can be made but every time I look at the market you find very few customers with a real need to move terabytes that can’t solve their problem with a snowball-style solution. Those that do usually also have the economics to justify a commercial package.

Don't know about vcinity, but Signiant was always a marketing-heavy, engineering-light organization. Their focus was on user convenience features, and they almost ignored actual transit engineering.

I don't doubt that it works, I'm more interested in how.

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