Concatenation, Embedding and Sharding: Do HTTP/1 Performance Best Practices Make Sense in HTTP/2?

Robin Marx, Peter Quax, Axel Faes, Wim Lamotte

2017

Abstract

Web page performance is becoming increasingly important for end users but also more difficult to provide by web developers, in part because of the limitations of the legacy HTTP/1 protocol. The new HTTP/2 protocol was designed with performance in mind, but existing work comparing its improvements to HTTP/1 often shows contradictory results. It is unclear for developers how to profit from HTTP/2 and whether current HTTP/1 best practices such as resource concatenation, resource embedding, and hostname sharding should still be used. In this work we introduce the Speeder framework, which uses established tools and software to easily and reproducibly test various setup permutations. We compare and discuss results over many parameters (e.g., network conditions, browsers, metrics), both from synthetic and realistic test cases. We find that in most non-extreme cases HTTP/2 is on a par with HTTP/1 and that most HTTP/1 best practices are applicable to HTTP/2. We show that situations in which HTTP/2 currently underperforms are mainly caused by inefficiencies in implementations, not due to shortcomings in the protocol itself.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Marx R., Quax P., Faes A. and Lamotte W. (2017). Concatenation, Embedding and Sharding: Do HTTP/1 Performance Best Practices Make Sense in HTTP/2? . In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST, ISBN 978-989-758-246-2, pages 160-173. DOI: 10.5220/0006364101600173

in Bibtex Style

@conference{webist17,
author={Robin Marx and Peter Quax and Axel Faes and Wim Lamotte},
title={Concatenation, Embedding and Sharding: Do HTTP/1 Performance Best Practices Make Sense in HTTP/2?},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST,},
year={2017},
pages={160-173},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006364101600173},
isbn={978-989-758-246-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST,
TI - Concatenation, Embedding and Sharding: Do HTTP/1 Performance Best Practices Make Sense in HTTP/2?
SN - 978-989-758-246-2
AU - Marx R.
AU - Quax P.
AU - Faes A.
AU - Lamotte W.
PY - 2017
SP - 160
EP - 173
DO - 10.5220/0006364101600173