LebGeeks

mir

Member

How is HTTP2 treating you?

Hey!

So, how is HTTP2 treating you? do you have it enabled on Apache, nginx etc? Did you feel big gains in performance? any problems or crashes?

I mean, http update! this is like a big deal! it is not a firefox update or something ;p

This is not a technical question or a bug or problem, so i doubt I can discuss this on stackoverflow or server fault - so, looking forward to hearing your opinions/experiences!

Cheers

Last edited by mir (February 1 2016)

rolf

Member

Re: How is HTTP2 treating you?

Hey mir, long time.
Nice to hear from you.
I haven't tried HTTP2, only read about it. It is likely that few people are using it yet.
The article I read went over the improvements, and mentioned a new web server software that natively supports it. I forgot the name though, and don't have the article by me (it is in Linux Magazine, maybe December). I'll post the name here when I get my hands on it.

My opinion (from that limited knowledge) is that the gains might not be huge, especially on smaller apps and now that browser support is not 100% (please correct me if I'm wrong), and server support might also not be perfect or very well implemented.
It takes away some protocol overhead by bundling requests in a single TCP session.
But on the scale of the web or on apps which do lots of requests the gains should be substancial.

Last edited by rolf (February 1 2016)

Hybrid

Member

Re: How is HTTP2 treating you?

I didn't enable it on any of my servers yet. However, I run few websites behind cloudflare, and cloudflare has been using http2 and SPDY for a while now. Everything seems to be working fine from a user's perspective.

How faster the sites are? I really can't tell since cloudflare offers caching, minifying etc...

However, according to a live cloudflare test (https://www.cloudflare.com/http2/), http2 loads pages around 5 times faster.

Joe

Member

Re: How is HTTP2 treating you?

Haven't seen any reason to do it yet. I'm still worried about moving to IPv6 way before even considering something that isn't really broken

mir

Member

Re: How is HTTP2 treating you?

Well, good to see you around here as well rolf :) and thanks always for the feedback.

Hybrid, do you mind sharing one of your websites? I am sure I can find/download an old browser or probably safari or IE and test the difference in loading speeds. 5 times faster is a big claim!
I've tried looking at websites I know like nytimes, cnn, bbc, readwrite and others - they all seem to be using http1

Joe, don't you think the speed gains (if confirmed) are good enough to tempt you? don't you think http1 is now broken for "modern" applications?

I think I'll set up a digital ocean droplet over the weekend (if time allows) and just do some tests. you're welcome to share with me some pieces of code you want tested there. Maybe we can benchmark this thing together.

Joe

Member

Re: How is HTTP2 treating you?

Joe, don't you think the speed gains (if confirmed) are good enough to tempt you? don't you think http1 is now broken for "modern" applications?

Let's just say that I think that most of the limitations I found with http have to do with poor app implementations rather than issues with the protocol itself. But hey, I'm willing to believe http2 could bring some improvements.

I'm in for the HTTP2 benchmark day next weekend. What do you have in mind?

mir

Member

Re: How is HTTP2 treating you?

Well, here is how it went (so far):

- Weekend was super bowl, so none of that coding happened.
- Today, I spent around 3 hours building things and compiling - things still not running, about to give up

I think I can wait a bit for this. maybe a week and I get back to this...

rolf

Member

Re: How is HTTP2 treating you?

I'm no sure this is the server that I had in mind, but anyway this one supports HTTP2, it seems, and is a lightweight drop in replacement for Apache.
Sounds really good. I've installed it but yet have to test all this functionality:
https://www.litespeedtech.com/http2-ready

PS: No Windows port.

Last edited by rolf (February 20 2016)

Hybrid

Member

Re: How is HTTP2 treating you?

If I remember correctly, litespeed is not for free for commercial use, and the open litespeed doesn't read apache configurations automatically.

There is also caddy webserver, https://caddyserver.com/, it seems to be the new cool toy on the block for the last 2 months, it supports both http2 and auto ssl generating and signing through letsencrypt

@mir, I'll pm you few websites behind cloudflare if you still wanna test http2

Last edited by Hybrid (February 20 2016)