- A/A test
- Running identical code against itself. The spread of its results is the noise a real difference has to beat.
- ACK
- An acknowledgment: the receiver’s signal that data arrived, so the sender can move on instead of resending.
- ACK compression
- Acknowledgments that arrive bunched together after a delay, so the sender learns of delivered data later than the path’s travel time alone would suggest.
- Admission
- Accepting new traffic only when the memory budget has room for it.
- Carrier
- A connection that carries URnetwork traffic between a device and the network, such as H1, H3 or P2P.
- Connect
- URnetwork’s open source networking library, which carries traffic between clients and providers.
- Drain
- Taking every queued packet off a queue in one pass.
- Fast.com
- A public download speed test, run here in a phone’s browser.
- Framer
- The format that marks where each message starts and ends on a carrier. FramerXL is the variant for large device RPC frames.
- GC
- Garbage collection: Go reclaiming memory that is no longer used. GOGC and the soft limit set how often and how hard it works.
- Goroutine
- A lightweight Go thread. Each one holds memory, so fewer is cheaper.
- gVisor
- An open source user-space network stack. Connect runs TCP/IP in it on the device.
- H1
- The carrier family over TLS, WebSocket and TCP, which passes through ordinary web infrastructure.
- H1+
- An upgrade inside H1 that sends the Framer format straight over the TLS stream, with a plain WebSocket as the fallback.
- H3
- The carrier family over QUIC.
- iOS profile
- The 32 MiB memory budget that stands in for an iPhone network extension, tested on allowlisted Android phones.
- LOWBAR
- The test suite for constrained links: delivery and latency at low rates, small MTU, loss and mixed routes.
- Median
- The middle value of a set of measurements.
- MEMSTEADY
- The test suite for memory over time: runtime peaks, quiet behavior, teardown and which code owns the memory.
- MiB
- A mebibyte, 1,048,576 bytes.
- Model Mbps
- A rate measured in a virtual-time model of the path rather than on real sockets. It shows that a mechanism works, not what a device gets.
- NAT
- Network address translation: mapping between private and public addresses, here on the provider.
- P2P
- A direct carrier between two devices.
- p95
- The value that 95% of the measurements stay at or below.
- Pacing
- Spacing packets out over time instead of sending them as soon as they are ready.
- Pack
- A Connect message that carries one or more packets on the wire.
- PERFVAR
- The performance suite: throughput, latency, wire and retransmission cost, correctness and calibration, scenario by scenario.
- Provider
- A device that shares its connection with the network. Traffic leaves the network through it.
- PTO
- Probe timeout: the point where a TCP sender stops waiting and probes for lost data.
- Race mode
- A Go build with the race detector on. It runs slower and catches data races.
- RPC
- Remote procedure call. Device RPC is the SDK’s local channel between the app and its network service on the same device.
- RTT
- Round-trip time: how long a message takes to get there and back.
- SDK
- The URnetwork software kit that the apps build on. It runs Connect on the device.
- SYN
- The first packet of a new TCP connection.
- synctest
- Go’s test package that runs code on a fake clock, so the timing is identical on every run.
- TTFB
- Time to first byte: how long until the first byte of a response arrives.
- TUN
- A virtual network interface. Full-TUN tests send traffic through the whole tunnel.
- WebSocket masking
- The XOR scrambling a WebSocket client must apply to everything it sends.
- Window
- How much data may be in flight before the sender waits for an acknowledgment. cwnd is the congestion window.