Re:Hello HTTP/2, Goodbye SPDY
by dragonwriter on Monday February 09, 2015 @06:49PM
(#9024582)
> So to answer your question: Header compression as employed in HTTP 2.0 helps if you do many requests with similar headers on the same connection.
In general, HTTP/2.0 seems to be about improving things if you do many requests over the same connection.
I think this is correct - because that is one big area where TCP and HTTP really fall short.
HTTP/2 should be a huge improvement for lowering latency in anything but the simplest web sites, without having to use ugly hacks such as sprite sheets and putting all your javascript/CSS in one file (which is sub-optimal in terms of caching if you want to update say a single javascript file, because then a user with a full cache has to re-download the huge concatenated javascript file instead of just the single source that changed), and avoiding spanning things across multiple domains to get around browsers having a connection limit.
Doing many requests over the same connection is very common.
Re:Hello HTTP/2, Goodbye SPDY
by frankzinger on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @01:20AM
(#9025666)
And one of the fundamental goals of HTTP/2 was to get clients to create only a single connection to a server.
Re:Hello HTTP/2, Goodbye SPDY
by patrickmcmanus on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @10:57AM
(#9027917)
right. The other key fact is that request header compression is necessary to make parallelism work when interacting with tcp congestion control. Its critical.
So to answer your question: Header compression as employed in HTTP 2.0 helps if you do many requests with similar headers on the same connection.