INGI seminar on Oct. 28 at 11:50 am - Réaumur building, a.327

The Curious Case of Parallel Connections in HTTP/2 by Jawad Manzoor, UCLouvain.

 

Web pages and web-based services are becoming more and more complex.

Although the bandwidth has been increasing exponentially in the last few years, the web experience is not improving at the same pace because of latency issues in HTTP/1. The HTTP/2 protocol aims to solve these issues by allowing clients and servers to multiplex HTTP requests and responses on a single TCP connection. If HTTP/2 is widely adopted, it can have enormous benefits not only for the user experience, but also for the servers and the network.

We perform experiments to examine if web browsers use a single connection per domain over HTTP/2 in practice. Contrary to popular belief, our experiments on the traffic of a large university campus network and a residential network show that a significant number of HTTP/2 accesses are performed using parallel connections to a single domain on a server. We present two possible hypotheses for this behavior and discuss its implications for the future of the web.

Jawad Manzoor is a first-year PhD student at Université Catholique de Louvain.  He is a fellowship holder of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate in Distributed  Computing program. His research interests include network traffic  measurements and distributed web-based applications. Currently he is working  on the analysis of the HTTP/2 protocol.

Published on October 28, 2016