Tag Archives: HTTP/3

Workshop day two

HTTP Workshop At 5pm we rounded off another fully featured day at the HTTP workshop. Here’s some of what we touched on today:

Moritz started the morning with an interesting presentation about experiments with running the exact same site and contents on h1 vs h2 over different kinds of networks, with different packet loss scenarios and with different ICWND set and more. Very interesting stuff. If he makes his presentation available at some point I’ll add a link to it.

I then got the honor to present the state of the TCP Tuning draft (which I’ve admittedly been neglecting a bit lately), the slides are here. I made it brief but I still got some feedback and in general this is a draft that people seem to agree is a good idea – keep sending me your feedback and help me improve it. I just need to pull myself together now and move it forward. I tried to be quick to leave over to…

Jana, who was back again to tell us about QUIC and the state of things in that area. His presentation apparently was a subset of slides he presented last week in the Berlin IETF. One interesting take-away for me, was that they’ve noticed that the amount of connections for which they detect UDP rate limiting on, has decreased with 2/3 during the last year!

Here’s my favorite image from his slide set. Apparently TCP/2 is not a name for QUIC that everybody appreciates! 😉

call-it-tcp2-one-more-time

While I think the topic of QUIC piqued the interest of most people in the room and there were a lot of questions, thoughts and ideas around the topic we still managed to get the lunch break pretty much in time and we could run off and have another lovely buffet lunch. There’s certainly no risk for us loosing weight during this event…

After lunch we got ourselves a series of Lightning talks presented for us. Seven short talks on various subjects that people had signed up to do

One of the lightning talks that stuck with me was what I would call the idea about an extended Happy Eyeballs approach that I’d like to call Even Happier Eyeballs: make the client TCP connect to all IPs in a DNS response and race them against each other and use the one that responds with a SYN-ACK first. There was interest expressed in the room to get this concept tested out for real in at least one browser.

We then fell over into the area of HTTP/3 ideas and what the people in the room think we should be working on for that. It turned out that the list of stuff we created last year at the workshop was still actually a pretty good list and while we could massage that a bit, it is still mostly the same as before.

Anne presented fetch and how browsers use HTTP. Perhaps a bit surprising that soon brought us over into the subject of trailers, how to support that and voilá, in the end we possibly even agreed that we should perhaps consider handling them somehow in browsers and even for javascript APIs… ( nah, curl/libcurl doesn’t have any particular support for trailers, but will of course get that if we’ll actually see things out there start to use it for real)

I think we deserved a few beers after this day! The final workshop day is tomorrow.

HTTP/2 in April 2016

On April 12 I had the pleasure of doing another talk in the Google Tech Talk series arranged in the Google Stockholm offices. I had given it the title “HTTP/2 is upon us, and here’s what you need to know about it.” in the invitation.

The room seated 70 persons but we had the amazing amount of over 300 people in the waiting line who unfortunately didn’t manage to get a seat. To those, and to anyone else who cares, here’s the video recording of the event.

If you’ve seen me talk about HTTP/2 before, you might notice that I’ve refreshed the material somewhat since before.

Summers are for HTTP

stockholm castle and ship
Stockholm City, as photographed by Michael Caven

In July 2015, 40-something HTTP implementers and experts of the world gathered in the city of Münster, Germany, to discuss nitty gritty details about the HTTP protocol during four intense days. Representatives for major browsers, other well used HTTP tools and the most popular HTTP servers were present. We discussed topics like how HTTP/2 had done so far, what we thought we should fix going forward and even some early blue sky talk about what people could potentially see being subjects to address in a future HTTP/3 protocol.

You can relive the 2015 version somewhat from my daily blog entries from then that include a bunch of details of what we discussed: day one, two, three and four.

http workshopThe HTTP Workshop was much appreciated by the attendees and it is now about to be repeated. In the summer of 2016, the HTTP Workshop is again taking place in Europe, but this time as a three-day event slightly further up north: in the capital of Sweden and my home town: Stockholm. During 25-27 July 2016, we intend to again dig in deep.

If you feel this is something for you, then please head over to the workshop site and submit your proposal and show your willingness to attend. This year, I’m also joining the Program Committee and I’ve signed up for arranging some of the local stuff required for this to work out logistically.

The HTTP Workshop 2015 was one of my favorite events of last year. I’m now eagerly looking forward to this year’s version. It’ll be great to meet you here!

Stockholm
The city of Stockholm in summer sunshine