Why think about HTTP 2.0?

#webperf #HTTP #mobile

The problem with web application performance is directly related to the increasing page size and number of objects comprising pages today. Increasing corporate bandwidth (the pipe between the Internet and the organization) doesn't generally help. The law of diminishing returns is at work; at some point more bandwidth (like more hardware) just isn't enough because the problem isn't in how fast bits are traveling, but how many times bits are traversing the network.

And for some clients - like mobile - it doesn't matter. They're getting 1-4Mbps and there's nothing you can do to change that.

The problem is HTTP isn't utilizing TCP efficiently, and thus the round trip - the time it takes for clients to talk to the application - is almost always the real culprit when looking for the source of web application performance issues. Especially for mobile clients, where a round trip carries with it an average latency of 150-300 ms.

More efficient use of TCP, better connection management, compression and other acceleration techniques are a must if we're going to really address web application performance. And that's what HTTP 2.0 is designed to do.