Portfolio ↗

TCP/IP

Handshakes, congestion control, head-of-line blocking and connection reuse.

3Questions
9Flashcards
2Terms
Drill this topic All of Networking
Questions

3 to work through

  1. beginner Multiple choice

    A 180 KB JSON response takes about 400 ms to reach a client 90 ms away on a connection whose handshake has just finished. The handler took 12 ms and the link has 200 Mbps spare. Measuring from the moment the request is written, what sets the floor?

    2 min answer
  2. intermediate

    An internal API is fast in isolation but a page that uses it takes 2 seconds for users in Asia while taking 200 ms in the origin region. The backend is equally fast for both. Diagnose and fix.

    2 min answer
  3. advanced

    A live-streaming platform ingests video from broadcasters on consumer uplinks where a single lost packet can stall the stream. Why does TCP behave badly here, and what are the options?

    2 min answer
Terminology

2 terms in this topic

protocol

TCP Handshake

The three-way SYN / SYN-ACK / ACK exchange that establishes a TCP connection, costing one round trip before any data moves.

 protocol

TCP/IP for Architects

What an architect actually needs from the transport layer — handshake cost, congestion behaviour, head-of-line blocking, and when to abandon TCP entirely.
Networking

Neighbouring topics

Networking

General material on the network path underneath an architecture.

4 quiz 13 cards 14 terms

HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 & HTTP/3

Multiplexing, prioritisation and the transport each is built on.

4 quiz 11 cards 5 terms

DNS

Resolution, TTL behaviour, traffic steering and failover latency.

5 quiz 7 cards 3 terms

TLS & Certificates

Encryption, integrity, authentication, termination points and expiry.

6 quiz 7 cards 5 terms

Layer 4 vs Layer 7

Connection-level versus request-level balancing, and what each unlocks.

4 quiz 10 cards 3 terms

Reverse Proxies

One place for TLS, routing, caching, compression and rate limiting.

3 quiz 9 cards 5 terms

Content Delivery Networks

Edge caching, origin offload, spike absorption and dynamic content.

8 quiz 11 cards 6 terms

Firewalls & Security Groups

Default-deny, stateful rules, and restricting egress as well as ingress.

5 quiz 8 cards 3 terms

NAT & Egress

Outbound-only connectivity, its per-gigabyte cost and its zone binding.

4 quiz 11 cards 4 terms

VPC Design

Address planning, peering and the ranges you can never resize.

3 quiz 9 cards 3 terms

Subnetting

Tiering, zone binding, and sizing for an address-hungry platform.

3 quiz 9 cards 3 terms

Routing & BGP

How traffic finds you, anycast, and route withdrawal as a failure mode.

2 quiz 8 cards 5 terms

Service Mesh Networking

Sidecar proxies supplying mTLS, retries and traffic policy.

4 quiz 11 cards 3 terms

WebSockets & Realtime

Persistent bidirectional connections and the capacity model they impose.

6 quiz 13 cards 6 terms

gRPC Transport

HTTP/2 multiplexing, binary encoding and streaming semantics.

4 quiz 12 cards 3 terms

API Gateways

The single entry point, and the business logic that must stay out of it.

3 quiz 10 cards 4 terms

Network Performance

Latency floors, bandwidth-delay product, and what no code change fixes.

5 quiz 13 cards 5 terms

Private Connectivity

Private endpoints, peering and dedicated links to managed services.

4 quiz 7 cards 3 terms

Network Troubleshooting

Flow logs, packet paths, and localising a problem to a hop.

6 quiz 8 cards 3 terms