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0 pointsbsdetector11y ago0 comments

> These insane perf gains are possible only thanks to HTTP/2, specifically thanks to its support for multiplexing.

What's sad about this is that if you load this site with pipelining enabled you get the same speed benefits as with HTTP/2 or SPDY, but Google would never know this, since they never tested SPDY against pipelining.

> ENHANCE_YOUR_CALM (0xb):

> Please read the spec and understand the technical implications before criticizing.

Please understand that -- technically -- this protocol is an embarrassment to the profession and to those involved in designing it.

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enneff11y ago

HTTP pipelining is busted for a variety of reasons. Support exists in most browsers but it's disabled by default because it makes things worse, on balance.

bsdetectorOP11y ago

At the time SPDY came out, Opera and Android Browser had pipelining on by default and Firefox was about to also default it on. They didn't only because of the promise of SPDY, not because pipelining "is busted". Pipelining works fine in almost all cases.

And if you only enable pipelining to known-good servers over a non-MITM SSL connection -- exactly like SPDY does -- then there is absolutely no problem with it and it performs similarly to SPDY. But I have no doubt you will continue spreading the party line from your employer, who couldn't be bothered to even test this.

gsnedders11y ago

Firefox wasn't about to default it to being on (yes, there was work being done on it to see how workable it was, but there was no decision to ship it) — it's well-known that pipelining causes all kinds of bizarre breakage with badly behaved servers and proxies (and the latter are where the implementations are especially bad).

Opera had enough problems with pretty crazy-complex heuristics as to when to enable pipelining; it would've been nice for them to have been published, but that has never happened. Determining what a known-good server is over SSL isn't that easy.

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