Cold Start or Hot Start? Robust Slow Start in Congestion Control with A Priori Knowledge for Mobile Web Services

Mobile web services value a quick loading of contents in the first page, which is quantified by the above-the-fold time of the first page (first AFT) and is likely to fall into the slow start phase in congestion control. However, the widely deployed slow start mechanism is "cold start", which manually hardcodes the parameters and is not suitable for the first AFT of heterogeneous mobile web services. We revisit the slow start mechanism and find that it could be optimized with a priori knowledge. However, blindly relying on a priori knowledge is not robust enough to handle the fluctuating mobile networks and unpredictable application traffic. In this paper, we propose WiseStart, a "hot-start-based" slow start mechanism. WiseStart utilizes the priori knowledge to set the initial parameters, continuously probes the new connection to handle the fluctuating network conditions, and carefully adapts to the application-limit scenarios. We implement WiseStart in a popular mobile web service online in production. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that WiseStart reduces the First AFT by 25.43% and the average RCT at connection establishment by 16.15% compared to the default slow start mechanism and other state-of-the-art baselines.