As many users have probably noticed, MASQUE over HTTP/3 offers excellent performance but can be unstable on restrictive networks. On the other hand, MASQUE over HTTP/2 is much easier to establish and keep alive, but its throughput appears to be limited (on my connection, around 500 KB/s per tunnel).
While experimenting, I found that this limitation can be mitigated by running multiple independent MASQUE HTTP/2 tunnels in parallel.
My setup was roughly:
- Multiple MASQUE identities.
- Multiple independent endpoints.
- One SOCKS5 port per Aether instance.
- A load balancer (such as Xray using
random or round-robin policies, or Proxifier using its Proxy Chain load balancer) distributing traffic across the tunnels.
With this approach, I was able to increase my download speed from roughly 500 KB/s to about 1 MB/s, simply by distributing traffic across multiple active tunnels.
This made me think that Aether could potentially implement this natively.
For example, Aether could support options such as:
- Number of MASQUE identities (default:
1)
- Number of endpoints/tunnels (default:
1)
- Built-in load balancing across healthy tunnels
- A single local SOCKS5 listener that transparently distributes traffic across the active connections
From the user's perspective, nothing would change—they would still configure only one SOCKS5 proxy—but internally Aether could maintain multiple tunnels and balance new connections across them.
This could significantly improve throughput for MASQUE HTTP/2 while keeping the configuration much simpler than running multiple Aether instances together with an external load balancer.
Of course, this feature would remain optional, with the default behavior continuing to use a single identity and a single endpoint.
As many users have probably noticed, MASQUE over HTTP/3 offers excellent performance but can be unstable on restrictive networks. On the other hand, MASQUE over HTTP/2 is much easier to establish and keep alive, but its throughput appears to be limited (on my connection, around 500 KB/s per tunnel).
While experimenting, I found that this limitation can be mitigated by running multiple independent MASQUE HTTP/2 tunnels in parallel.
My setup was roughly:
randomorround-robinpolicies, or Proxifier using its Proxy Chain load balancer) distributing traffic across the tunnels.With this approach, I was able to increase my download speed from roughly 500 KB/s to about 1 MB/s, simply by distributing traffic across multiple active tunnels.
This made me think that Aether could potentially implement this natively.
For example, Aether could support options such as:
1)1)From the user's perspective, nothing would change—they would still configure only one SOCKS5 proxy—but internally Aether could maintain multiple tunnels and balance new connections across them.
This could significantly improve throughput for MASQUE HTTP/2 while keeping the configuration much simpler than running multiple Aether instances together with an external load balancer.
Of course, this feature would remain optional, with the default behavior continuing to use a single identity and a single endpoint.