Why Tcp faster than http?

wcf networking tcp osi
King Chan picture King Chan · Oct 26, 2011 · Viewed 9.7k times · Source

I had a discussion with my manager, he said tcp is faster than http because of tcp is work on layer lower than http.

Then I remember about the OSI Model that I learnt in university, so I think what he meant is because http work on application layer but tcp work on transport layer (which is 2 layers belows) so is faster...

So my questions is:

  1. Is lower layers works faster than upper layers is becasue there is less layers need to access when doing data transfers betweens two computers?

  2. If so, that's mean when we use tcp (i.e with WCF), the commnicuation will be start at transport layers => down to physical layer => another computer's physical layer => up to transport layers? But I throught the data still need to be understand by the application, so it will still has to goes up to Application layer?

Thanks in advance.

Answer

Marcelo Cantos picture Marcelo Cantos · Oct 26, 2011

There is always a layer above TCP. The question is really about how much overhead the stuff above TCP adds. HTTP is relatively chunky because each transmission requires a bunch of header cruft in both the request and the response. It also tends to be used in a stateless mode, whereby each request/response uses a separate TCP session. Keep-alives can ameliorate the session-per-request, but not the headers.

Related questions

A socket operation was attempted to an unreachable host

One customer reported this error at my WCF client connecting to our server service. "Message: A socket operation was attempted to an unreachable host Type : System.Net.Sockets.SocketException" From this link http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms740668%28v=…

Read More
Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute

I can't get to the bottom of this error, because when the debugger is attached, it does not seem to occur. Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute Below is the code. This is a WCF server in a …

Read More
No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it 127.0.0.1:3446

I'm using the WCF4.0 template -REST. I'm trying to make a method that uploads a file using a stream. The problem always occur at Stream serverStream = request.GetRequestStream(); Class for streaming: namespace LogicClass { public class StreamClass : IStreamClass { public bool UploadFile(…

Read More