Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by throwaway892238 867 days ago
Lol, wait, HTTP2 and HTTP1.1 both trounce HTTP3? Talk about burying the lede. Wasn't performance the whole point behind HTTP3?

This chart shows that HTTP2 is more than half as slow as HTTP1.1, and HTTP3 is half as slow as HTTP2. Jesus christ. If these get adopted across the whole web, the whole web's performance could get up to 75% slower . That's insane. There should be giant red flags on these protocols that say "warning: slows down the internet"

2 comments

If the last decade of web protocol development seems backwards to you after reading one benchmark then why immediately assume it's insane and deserves a warning label instead of asking why your understanding doesn't match your expectations?

The benchmark meant to compare how resource efficient the new backend for curl is by using localhost connectivity. By using localhost connectivity any real world network considerations (such as throughput discovery, loss, latency, jitter, or buffering) are sidestepped to allow a direct measurement of how fast the backend alone is. You can't then assume those numbers have a meaningful direct extrapolation to the actual performance of the web because you don't know how the additional things the newer protocols do impact performance once you add a real network. Ingoring that, you still have to consider the notes like "Also, the HTTP/1.1 numbers are a bit unfair since they do run 50 TCP connections against the server." before making claims about HTTP2 being more than half as slow as HTTP1.1.

> Wasn't performance the whole point behind HTTP3?

Faster, more secure, and more reliable, yes. The numbers in this article looks terrible, but real-world testing¹ shows that real-world HTTP/3 performance is quite good, even though implementations are relatively young.

"…we saw substantially higher throughput on HTTP/3 compared to HTTP/2. For example, we saw about 69% of HTTP/3 connections reach a throughput of 5 Mbps or more […] compared to only 56% of HTTP/2 connections. In practice, this means that the video streams will be of a higher visual quality, and/or have fewer stalls over HTTP/3."

¹https://pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/measuring-http-3-real...