4 ms·

I recommend watching this video by Fast.ly on some real metrics comparing HTTP/2 and HTTP/1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yzJAKknE_k https://www.youtube.co

by rmdoss 10y ago

I recommend watching this video by Fast.ly on some real metrics comparing HTTP/2 and HTTP/1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yzJAKknE_k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yzJAKknE_k Overall, the performance gain is not as much (if any) compared to the hype we hear.

youngtaff 10y ago
If it's the video I'm thinking of they ran a huge number of tests, introduced packet loss and saw some issues. There's a few challenges here… WebPageTest uses DummyNet to simulate packet loss and in a HTTP/1.x scenario the not all TCP connections in the test will experience packet loss, whereas all the HTTP/2 ones will. Now in the real world if there's packet loss on route how likey is it that TCP connections experience packet loss? Our H2 implementations are still young, this Cloudflare work is one example, until they made this patch nginx didn't support HPACK and there are other issues in other browsers and servers too. As the implementations mature and we understand how to make the most of H2 then performance gains will appear - there's already evidence from people like the FT that there are gains to be made now.
- jgrahamc 10y ago
  Quite. Real world experience beats synthetic tests. Shipping counts for a lot. In the time that some other competitors have been talking about HTTP/2 we've had it out for a year and have been experimenting and improving (server push, HPACK, ...). Clearly, HTTP/2 is not the one-size-fits-all-answer-to-everything, but it amuses me to see competitors not shipping, yet talking a good game. See this sort of thing with HTTP/2, IPv6, ...
byuu 10y ago
Every time I look at the hype pages, it's always these unbelievably ridiculous edge cases. "Look at how much faster HTTP/2 is loading this page that is nothing but an array of 64 x 64 icons that are each 16x16 pixels!" -- well of course that's going to be slow with HTTP/1 if each icon is unique and not cached. But who does that? If that pathological case is yours, then sprite the icons and now it's one request, done.
Matthias247 10y ago
Performance gain is most likely even negative if you use it for transferring bigger amounts of data (file uploads or downloads) - since the stream multiplexing layer will often lead to an additional copy for each sent/received byte. But that's probably not what the majority of HTTP is used for. On the other hand it will really help all the pages that are making dozens of concurrent small requests, which can't be handled in parallel through HTTP/1 due to connection limitations.

by rmdoss 10y ago

youngtaff 10y ago

If it's the video I'm thinking of they ran a huge number of tests, introduced packet loss and saw some issues. There's a few challenges here… WebPageTest uses DummyNet to simulate packet loss and in a HTTP/1.x scenario the not all TCP connections in the test will experience packet loss, whereas all the HTTP/2 ones will. Now in the real world if there's packet loss on route how likey is it that TCP connections experience packet loss? Our H2 implementations are still young, this Cloudflare work is one example, until they made this patch nginx didn't support HPACK and there are other issues in other browsers and servers too. As the implementations mature and we understand how to make the most of H2 then performance gains will appear - there's already evidence from people like the FT that there are gains to be made now.

jgrahamc 10y ago
Quite. Real world experience beats synthetic tests. Shipping counts for a lot. In the time that some other competitors have been talking about HTTP/2 we've had it out for a year and have been experimenting and improving (server push, HPACK, ...). Clearly, HTTP/2 is not the one-size-fits-all-answer-to-everything, but it amuses me to see competitors not shipping, yet talking a good game. See this sort of thing with HTTP/2, IPv6, ...

byuu 10y ago

Every time I look at the hype pages, it's always these unbelievably ridiculous edge cases. "Look at how much faster HTTP/2 is loading this page that is nothing but an array of 64 x 64 icons that are each 16x16 pixels!" -- well of course that's going to be slow with HTTP/1 if each icon is unique and not cached. But who does that? If that pathological case is yours, then sprite the icons and now it's one request, done.

Matthias247 10y ago

Performance gain is most likely even negative if you use it for transferring bigger amounts of data (file uploads or downloads) - since the stream multiplexing layer will often lead to an additional copy for each sent/received byte. But that's probably not what the majority of HTTP is used for. On the other hand it will really help all the pages that are making dozens of concurrent small requests, which can't be handled in parallel through HTTP/1 due to connection limitations.