4 ms·

Yes, I do notice a significant speed up with HTTP/3 compared to 1.1. But I have spent some years of my life playing eSports shooters competitively and I can te

by clnq 3y ago

Yes, I do notice a significant speed up with HTTP/3 compared to 1.1. But I have spent some years of my life playing eSports shooters competitively and I can tell the difference between something happening in 150ms or 250ms and monitors below 120Hz make me uncomfortable. Some people, on the other hand, claim that cloud gaming has no perceivable input lag. So it depends on the person. With that said, 1.1->3 should be perceivable for most people, I think. Head-of-line blocking is slowing things down significantly. HTTP/3 latency feels like browsing with UDP, which it is. Of course, browsers do caching and pre-emptive loading, so the user experience in many cases will be the same. But when loading a website for the first time, or reading an article with many images for the first time, I think the difference in page load/draw times can be easily observed. EDIT: On further investigation, it seems like 1.1->3 should be perceivable for most people if they are on poor quality connections, and if the website/web app is heavy. Looks like I fall into that bracket with some of my devices as I live in an ancient house with stone walls, the natural enemy of WiFi.

elgatito 3y ago
Would you have a site where that can be reproduced? While I am not saying it might be to some extent subjective, I cannot say I have noticed anything noticably different between and 1.1 and 2 or 3. For that reason I'd be curious on which site that would be noticable.
- clnq 3y ago
  YouTube, for example. I haven’t done a rigorous test and looked at the timings. But I disabled HTTP/3 in my Safari settings just now and browsed around YouTube in Private mode. Then I did the same with HTTP/3 enabled. It was at least 3x faster at initial page draws with HTTP/3. I did this test just now on weak WiFi.
  - elgatito 3y ago
    Thanks for the example. Though, Youtube was definitely one of the sites I visited. I just ran a test with HTTP 1.1 and HTTP 3 - and in both cases, it took about 10 seconds until the whole page was loaded. It was already usable earlier than that, but even that was similar between 1.1 and 3. The test was done on a "regular" Wifi connection.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - clnq 3y ago
      I just tested how long it took to get full content draws of YouTube over HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/3 with my wired 1Gbps machine and Chromium-based Edge (with InPrivate and no extensions, obviously). I did three tests a couple of minutes apart. Timings: HTTP/1.1: 2.54s, 2.18s, 2.51s HTTP/3: 2.07s, 1.95s, 2.40s What does N=3 mean? Probably not much. The findings confirm my feeling that HTTP/3 is faster, but it is difficult to separate signal from the noise with so few readings. Plus, reasonably, I understand that other factors can bias these readings much more. Moreover, I don't think that this matters as much in wired connections where packet loss is very minimal compared to WiFi, especially bad WiFi. Over a weak WiFi connection, subjectively, the full content draw timings felt significantly different to me. Though I didn't do a strict measurement. I wonder what these timings would look on cellular.
      - elgatito 3y ago
        Thanks for the test, these rather very close values reflect my experience as well. While my Internet connection is actually based on a mobile connection, it's still difficult for me to comment how a classic smartphone may behave, as that's not my typical use-case. Here, UDP may offer some advantages, if the connection quality can vary. I wonder if it was a fair summary to say, that HTTP 2+ (and especially HTTP 3) may offer advantages for unreliable connections, but not so much over somewhat reliable connections.
andrewmcwatters 3y ago
I don't believe this for a second. When you play a game, you know what performance target it should be hitting, because you can visually see it. There's no meaningful performance target for websites. Instant would be great, and so for matters of debate, let's say that's the next vsync poll and go with the most common poll rate that exists today, ~16ms for 60hz monitors. Is that going to happen? No. Since you don't know what the up/down speed is for any random given website, there's no way to know if what you're experiencing is just the server with a low upload speed to to your client, or the protocol itself. And the Internet connection of the website itself, the language the web server is written in, the performance of the software in question, and other factors are going to have dramatically more impact than the protocol version in question.
- clnq 3y ago
  > There's no meaningful performance target for websites. Instant would be great, and so for matters of debate, let's say that's the next vsync poll and go with the most common poll rate that exists today, ~16ms for 60hz monitors. Is that going to happen? No. You set an unreasonable arbitrary target and then say neither 1.1 nor 3 will reach it. Yes, I agree. But I don't understand how this is useful. Cloudflare's QUIC test page gets drawn in about 200ms for me with HTTP/3, while it takes about 250ms to draw it with HTTP 1.1. 50ms is 2-3 frames on a v-synced 60Hz monitor. I see the same "few frames quicker" effect on many basic websites that support HTTP/3, and much more significant changes on heavy websites or over poor infrastructure where head-of-line blocking can hurt more.

by clnq 3y ago

elgatito 3y ago

Would you have a site where that can be reproduced? While I am not saying it might be to some extent subjective, I cannot say I have noticed anything noticably different between and 1.1 and 2 or 3. For that reason I'd be curious on which site that would be noticable.

clnq 3y ago
YouTube, for example. I haven’t done a rigorous test and looked at the timings. But I disabled HTTP/3 in my Safari settings just now and browsed around YouTube in Private mode. Then I did the same with HTTP/3 enabled. It was at least 3x faster at initial page draws with HTTP/3. I did this test just now on weak WiFi.
- elgatito 3y ago
  Thanks for the example. Though, Youtube was definitely one of the sites I visited. I just ran a test with HTTP 1.1 and HTTP 3 - and in both cases, it took about 10 seconds until the whole page was loaded. It was already usable earlier than that, but even that was similar between 1.1 and 3. The test was done on a "regular" Wifi connection.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - clnq 3y ago
    I just tested how long it took to get full content draws of YouTube over HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/3 with my wired 1Gbps machine and Chromium-based Edge (with InPrivate and no extensions, obviously). I did three tests a couple of minutes apart. Timings: HTTP/1.1: 2.54s, 2.18s, 2.51s HTTP/3: 2.07s, 1.95s, 2.40s What does N=3 mean? Probably not much. The findings confirm my feeling that HTTP/3 is faster, but it is difficult to separate signal from the noise with so few readings. Plus, reasonably, I understand that other factors can bias these readings much more. Moreover, I don't think that this matters as much in wired connections where packet loss is very minimal compared to WiFi, especially bad WiFi. Over a weak WiFi connection, subjectively, the full content draw timings felt significantly different to me. Though I didn't do a strict measurement. I wonder what these timings would look on cellular.
    - elgatito 3y ago
      Thanks for the test, these rather very close values reflect my experience as well. While my Internet connection is actually based on a mobile connection, it's still difficult for me to comment how a classic smartphone may behave, as that's not my typical use-case. Here, UDP may offer some advantages, if the connection quality can vary. I wonder if it was a fair summary to say, that HTTP 2+ (and especially HTTP 3) may offer advantages for unreliable connections, but not so much over somewhat reliable connections.

andrewmcwatters 3y ago

I don't believe this for a second. When you play a game, you know what performance target it should be hitting, because you can visually see it. There's no meaningful performance target for websites. Instant would be great, and so for matters of debate, let's say that's the next vsync poll and go with the most common poll rate that exists today, ~16ms for 60hz monitors. Is that going to happen? No. Since you don't know what the up/down speed is for any random given website, there's no way to know if what you're experiencing is just the server with a low upload speed to to your client, or the protocol itself. And the Internet connection of the website itself, the language the web server is written in, the performance of the software in question, and other factors are going to have dramatically more impact than the protocol version in question.

clnq 3y ago
> There's no meaningful performance target for websites. Instant would be great, and so for matters of debate, let's say that's the next vsync poll and go with the most common poll rate that exists today, ~16ms for 60hz monitors. Is that going to happen? No. You set an unreasonable arbitrary target and then say neither 1.1 nor 3 will reach it. Yes, I agree. But I don't understand how this is useful. Cloudflare's QUIC test page gets drawn in about 200ms for me with HTTP/3, while it takes about 250ms to draw it with HTTP 1.1. 50ms is 2-3 frames on a v-synced 60Hz monitor. I see the same "few frames quicker" effect on many basic websites that support HTTP/3, and much more significant changes on heavy websites or over poor infrastructure where head-of-line blocking can hurt more.