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0 pointsjacquesm11y ago0 comments

I'm sure it does. But the overhead associated with SSL connections is something that should be solved at that level, not by shoehorning a complete multiplexing system into an otherwise relatively clean protocol. It seems to me that that violates a whole pile of good design principles.

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kjksf11y ago· 1 in thread

The major speed increase is not from eliminating ssl handshake (though it helps) but by multiplexing many logical http connections on one tcp stream.

It's solved exactly at the level it had to be solved.

The nitty gritty of why opening a new tcp stream for each http request is slow (and why http pipelining doesn't make it faster the way spdy does) is beyond the scope of this post but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yxQIRl6Qic explains that and other benefits of http/2.0 in great detail.

mateo41111y ago

Yes, I agree.

I think the biggest win for HTTP/2 is multiplexing the requests over a single TCP connection. The average web page downloads over 1MB of data over 80 to 100 Http requests. Each request is requires its own TCP connection.

Modern browsers download 6 assets per host at a time. This decision is so we don't have too many TCP connections competing for the same bandwidth. People optimize the page load times, by combining javascript, combining images with CSS sprites, or adding additional hosts so they can download more of the assets in parallel.

I think that the waterfall chart is an intuitive way to understand how the assets on your website is affecting the page load time. It will be interesting to see what new ways we visualize the process of assets downloading and different browser events, when HTTP/2 starts to be more widely used.

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