Analysis of speed deficiency of Snowflake in China, 2023 Q1

We are currently observing an increase of snowflake bootstrap failure. This ticket document our investigation of this incident.

As we can observe from the vantage point test result, the bootstrap percentage is often more than 10 and less than 100 as a result of poor connection speed.

In order to measure the packet loss rate at the vantage points a few scripts are used to calculate the packet loss rate from packet capture file, here is the result:

snowflake-probe-0-eth0.pcap:TOTAL 3027, RECV 2702, LOSS RATE .107
snowflake-probe-1-eth0.pcap:TOTAL 3406, RECV 3169, LOSS RATE .069
snowflake-probe-2-eth0.pcap:TOTAL 2896, RECV 2294, LOSS RATE .207
snowflake-probe-3-eth0.pcap:TOTAL 2883, RECV 2652, LOSS RATE .080
snowflake-probe-4-eth0.pcap:TOTAL 2696, RECV 2514, LOSS RATE .067
snowflake-probe-5-eth0.pcap:TOTAL 847, RECV 669, LOSS RATE .210
snowflake-probe-6-eth0.pcap:TOTAL 1855, RECV 1692, LOSS RATE .087
snowflake-probe-7-eth0.pcap:TOTAL 76, RECV 284, LOSS RATE -2.736 (invalid, more than one dtls connection)
snowflake-probe-8-eth0.pcap:TOTAL 1577, RECV 1255, LOSS RATE .204
snowflake-probe-9-eth0.pcap:TOTAL 1449, RECV 1166, LOSS RATE .195

As we can see snowflake's bootstrap percentage is regularly impacted by packet loss rate. We can either make snowflake more resistant to packet loss or improve matching process to reduce packet loss.