What makes I2Speed unique?
We have many speed and CPU improvements detailed on our site. Those
will have most benefit when running on low end machines and / or
lots of processor cores. On very fast machines you earn just some
milliseconds round trip and lower power consumption.
Our main focus is improved networking. Do not believe synthetic
benchmarks, always test on the live net. The I2P codebase still has
bugs and bottlenecks which distort any such comparison. With I2Speed
your router will settle to use faster UDP for a lot of its traffic.
Why this is a good thing:
- TCP is a reliable bitstream protocol. Data is always delivered
in sequence. Later data is useless without previous packets and
I2P even encrypts packets using bits from the previous packet
with NTCP2. This causes strict sequential processing, so
multi-threading is only of limited use. If a packet gets lost,
communication stalls on the OS level already until the stream is
complete for in-order delivery.
- However I2P is message based. Later data on the same
connection is frequently independent from previous packets.
- SSU (semi-secure reliable UDP) wraps messages into packets,
for most traffic this is a 1:1 relationship. Those are low level
messages with transport-layer encryption carrying wrapped up
messages from your local clients with additional strong
end-to-end encryption.
- Most of the time when running multiple tunnels across one
connection, data from different tunnels travels in separate
packets.
- Here I2Speed comes into play: Even with a little bit of
packet loss we transfer further packets over UDP. This will
frequently cause all tunnels on that connection to continue
running at full speed, just delaying the one that has packets
retransmitted. Mainline I2P applies a TCP algorithm that slow
connections down. It is that simple.
- This is not to say that TCP is inferior. We also made NTCP2
much faster by parallizing processing once the individual
messages get peeled out of the encrypted transport stream and by
applying a lot of performance tweaks.
How long will this work? If I2P replaces SSU by something like NTCP2
over UDP, our approach is defeated and a network slowdown will be
seen. Same will occur if todays problems with TCP will cause the
entire internet to be migrated eventually. Read all here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_Internetwork_Architecture
Updated 210518
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