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One way to get around this is to use HAProxy as a middleman where it can handle HTTP2 concurrent connections on the frontend and then connect to the HTTP1.1 web

One way to get around this is to use HAProxy as a middleman where it can handle HTTP2 concurrent connections on the frontend and then connect to the HTTP1.1 webservers on localhost on the backend so that you don't have to pay the big TCP connection latency.

KirinDave 8y ago
Right, and this is "better" but if you start handling significant volume you're going to want HTTP/2 behind your proxy. Envoy does this, and it's a basically free way to just get more out of your hardware and network.
- blackflame7000 8y ago
  Not necessarily because let's say your backend server is multi-threaded and assigns each connection to its own thread for DoS safety. Now with HTTP2, you will make one connection to the backend server even though you are multiplexing those requests they’re still being served serially by one thread+socket. Even if you Demux and use threadhandlers you have to remux and are still limited to the single socket. Now if HAProxy makes multiple connections to the backend each one gets served by its own thread+socket and that's going to load much faster because at the very least it's going to get more attention from the OS. Furthermore, if you use the keepAlive header, and set long timeouts, then you don’t even have to pay the connection penalty. So essentially you’ve shifted thread management to HAProxy by virtue of its parallel connections which keeps the webserver code pretty simple. And in a C++ program simplicity is key to correctness
  - shawnz 8y ago
    Why not just make multiple HTTP2 connections then?
    - blackflame7000 8y ago
      First let me give some background. In the beginning there was HTTP1.0 where you send a request recieve a reply and then terminate the connection. A TCP connection required 3 round trip packets for every connection + a reques and a recieve meant that 60% of the delay was mearly getting ready to talk. Http1.1 brought pipelining where you could use the keepalive header and send req1, req2, recN and then expect to recieve reply1, reply2, replyN. The replies are expected in the order they are requested. Http2 adds a bunch of things. For one, the requests are in a binary format instead of a text in order to acheive better compression. Another thing is that it allows multiplexing. This is different from pipelining because now you can recieve replies out of order which allows small files not to get stalled out by large files. However, HAProxy will Demux the http2 requests and separate them into multiple parallel connections to the backend server where each connection supports pipelining so as not to close immediately. Each request will use a connection that’s free (ie doesnt already have a pipelined req in progess) so this is effectively the same as http2 multiplexing since HAProxy will send them back to the client in the order they are recieved from the backend (which isnt necessarily the requested order aka multiplexed) The benefit here is that 1) If you have multiple webservers, they dont have to each deal with the muxing/demuxing of streams and converting the binary to http.(might be possible to skip binary translation but code will be ugly) 2) If you have parallel connections each using threatpools to handle each request stream then you could start running into thread contention problems 3) You protect your C++ webservice with a battle tested service like HAProxy
      - shawnz 8y ago
        I understand what you are saying. But why do you need to use http 1.1 behind the proxy for this setup? Why can't you use http 2 both behind and in front of the reverse proxy, but still demux into multiple connections at the proxy? Just because http 2 supports multiplexing, doesn't mean that you need to use it.
        blackflame7000 8y ago
        You definitely can, I'm just arguing that the complexity involved to implement the feature is not worth the real world performance gain. Furthermore, by adding that complexity you make it that much harder to make sure the program is free of undefined behavior.
  - KirinDave 8y ago
    I'm not sure I agree with most of this post. Firstly, a userland socket mux/demux implementation isn't such an insurmountable challenge. It's essentially the core of a good http/2 implementation. If you've got a good HTTP/2 implementation, you've necessarily got a good mux/demux solution. > Now if HAProxy makes multiple connections to the backend each one gets served by its own thread+socket and that's going to load much faster because at the very least it's going to get more attention from the OS. I'm not sure what you're basing this on. What is the technical definition of "more attention from the OS." If anything, limiting things down to a single process over one connection will improve latency. It'll can help minimize memory copies if you get volume because you'll get more than one frame per read (and you certainly aren't serving a L>4 protocol out of your NIC). Most importantly, it'll remove connection establishment and teardown costs. These aren't free. Now, if you really are loading backends so that responsiveness is a problem, you'll need to appeal to whatever load balancing solution you have on hand. But most folks agree that this is faster. > Furthermore, if you use the keepAlive header, and set long timeouts, then you don’t even have to pay the connection penalty. But you still have head-of-line blocking, so you're still spamming N connections per client to get that concurrency factor. Connections aren't free, they have state and take up system resources. You'll serve more clients with one backend if you take up less resources per connection. > So essentially you’ve shifted thread management to HAProxy by virtue of its parallel connections which keeps the webserver code pretty simple. I don't think this is true at all. If you want to serve connections in parallel or access resources relevant to your service in parallel, you're going to need to do that. You can of course choose to NOT do this and spam a billion processes rather than use concurrency. > And in a C++ program simplicity is key to correctness I don't think this is unique to C++, but I'm also not sure it's really relevant here. From an application backend's perspective, it's very much the same model. They need a model that supports re-entrant request serving.

KirinDave 8y ago

Right, and this is "better" but if you start handling significant volume you're going to want HTTP/2 behind your proxy. Envoy does this, and it's a basically free way to just get more out of your hardware and network.

blackflame7000 8y ago
Not necessarily because let's say your backend server is multi-threaded and assigns each connection to its own thread for DoS safety. Now with HTTP2, you will make one connection to the backend server even though you are multiplexing those requests they’re still being served serially by one thread+socket. Even if you Demux and use threadhandlers you have to remux and are still limited to the single socket. Now if HAProxy makes multiple connections to the backend each one gets served by its own thread+socket and that's going to load much faster because at the very least it's going to get more attention from the OS. Furthermore, if you use the keepAlive header, and set long timeouts, then you don’t even have to pay the connection penalty. So essentially you’ve shifted thread management to HAProxy by virtue of its parallel connections which keeps the webserver code pretty simple. And in a C++ program simplicity is key to correctness
- shawnz 8y ago
  Why not just make multiple HTTP2 connections then?
  - blackflame7000 8y ago
    First let me give some background. In the beginning there was HTTP1.0 where you send a request recieve a reply and then terminate the connection. A TCP connection required 3 round trip packets for every connection + a reques and a recieve meant that 60% of the delay was mearly getting ready to talk. Http1.1 brought pipelining where you could use the keepalive header and send req1, req2, recN and then expect to recieve reply1, reply2, replyN. The replies are expected in the order they are requested. Http2 adds a bunch of things. For one, the requests are in a binary format instead of a text in order to acheive better compression. Another thing is that it allows multiplexing. This is different from pipelining because now you can recieve replies out of order which allows small files not to get stalled out by large files. However, HAProxy will Demux the http2 requests and separate them into multiple parallel connections to the backend server where each connection supports pipelining so as not to close immediately. Each request will use a connection that’s free (ie doesnt already have a pipelined req in progess) so this is effectively the same as http2 multiplexing since HAProxy will send them back to the client in the order they are recieved from the backend (which isnt necessarily the requested order aka multiplexed) The benefit here is that 1) If you have multiple webservers, they dont have to each deal with the muxing/demuxing of streams and converting the binary to http.(might be possible to skip binary translation but code will be ugly) 2) If you have parallel connections each using threatpools to handle each request stream then you could start running into thread contention problems 3) You protect your C++ webservice with a battle tested service like HAProxy
    - shawnz 8y ago
      I understand what you are saying. But why do you need to use http 1.1 behind the proxy for this setup? Why can't you use http 2 both behind and in front of the reverse proxy, but still demux into multiple connections at the proxy? Just because http 2 supports multiplexing, doesn't mean that you need to use it.
      - blackflame7000 8y ago
        You definitely can, I'm just arguing that the complexity involved to implement the feature is not worth the real world performance gain. Furthermore, by adding that complexity you make it that much harder to make sure the program is free of undefined behavior.
- KirinDave 8y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with most of this post. Firstly, a userland socket mux/demux implementation isn't such an insurmountable challenge. It's essentially the core of a good http/2 implementation. If you've got a good HTTP/2 implementation, you've necessarily got a good mux/demux solution. > Now if HAProxy makes multiple connections to the backend each one gets served by its own thread+socket and that's going to load much faster because at the very least it's going to get more attention from the OS. I'm not sure what you're basing this on. What is the technical definition of "more attention from the OS." If anything, limiting things down to a single process over one connection will improve latency. It'll can help minimize memory copies if you get volume because you'll get more than one frame per read (and you certainly aren't serving a L>4 protocol out of your NIC). Most importantly, it'll remove connection establishment and teardown costs. These aren't free. Now, if you really are loading backends so that responsiveness is a problem, you'll need to appeal to whatever load balancing solution you have on hand. But most folks agree that this is faster. > Furthermore, if you use the keepAlive header, and set long timeouts, then you don’t even have to pay the connection penalty. But you still have head-of-line blocking, so you're still spamming N connections per client to get that concurrency factor. Connections aren't free, they have state and take up system resources. You'll serve more clients with one backend if you take up less resources per connection. > So essentially you’ve shifted thread management to HAProxy by virtue of its parallel connections which keeps the webserver code pretty simple. I don't think this is true at all. If you want to serve connections in parallel or access resources relevant to your service in parallel, you're going to need to do that. You can of course choose to NOT do this and spam a billion processes rather than use concurrency. > And in a C++ program simplicity is key to correctness I don't think this is unique to C++, but I'm also not sure it's really relevant here. From an application backend's perspective, it's very much the same model. They need a model that supports re-entrant request serving.