June 26, 2026
Socket to me, baby
SOCKMAP - TCP splicing of the future
A bold speed boost idea drops — and the comments instantly turn into a roast
TLDR: The article says a Linux feature could make the hidden traffic-directing parts of the internet faster and cheaper by cutting waste. Commenters, however, were split between “interesting, but unfinished” and “this post explains it badly,” with several openly roasting the write-up.
A big infrastructure blog post tried to sell readers on a future where internet middlemen like reverse proxies can move data faster and with less waste by keeping more of the work inside the operating system instead of bouncing it through an app. In plain English: it’s a way to make the behind-the-scenes plumbing of the web cheaper and quicker, which matters when you run massive services that handle oceans of traffic.
But the real fireworks were in the comments, where the community reacted less like an impressed audience and more like judges at a talent show. One reader hit it with the brutal summary: “not ready for prime time” — then twisted the knife by calling it still probably the best post from the company in months. Ouch. Another commenter basically time-stamped the whole thing with a dry “(2019)”, the internet equivalent of raising one eyebrow and asking why everyone’s acting like this is fresh tea.
Still, not everyone came just to boo. One more measured voice said the tool has changed a lot since then, with multiple companies pushing fixes and trying to solve the messy “what happens under pressure?” problem. In other words: yes, it was rough, but maybe don’t bury it yet. And then came the harshest hot take of all — that readers would be better off reading the docs because the article felt like “marketing slop.” So the mood was clear: exciting idea, messy rollout, and a comment section absolutely unwilling to clap just because the future sounds shiny.
Key Points
- •The article presents Linux kernel SOCKMAP as a potential mechanism for TCP socket splicing in reverse proxy workloads.
- •It compares existing Linux syscalls including sendfile(2), splice(2), and vmsplice, noting that they reduce copying but are specialized and synchronous.
- •The article identifies syscall cost, wakeup latency, and copying cost as three main inefficiencies in userspace data forwarding.
- •It notes that forwarding between TCP sockets is common in HTTP proxies, reverse proxies, and load balancers such as Squid, Varnish, NGINX, and HAProxy.
- •A TCP echo server is used as a simplified example to explain naive forwarding, splice-based forwarding, and alternatives involving AIO and eBPF.