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by wmf 4278 days ago
there would only be one initial slow start for all the requests

Which is worse than HTTP/1.1. Avoiding that problem is why HTTP/2 uses hpack.

1 comments

Why worse? Wouldn't multiple HTTP/1.1 requests sharing a persistent TCP-connection also only have one initial slow start phase?

Maybe the SCTP multiplexing / parallelization of the requests and thus the initial headers affect this negatively as more headers would be transferred during the one initial slow start.

If the delay caused by slow start is a big problem one could add header compression to HTTP/1.x and run it over SCTP.

I understand that a transport protocol designed especially for and embedded in HTTP/2 will be more optimal than a generic one like SCTP. But my argument is that a multiplexing transport protocol like SCTP could be good enough. And usable for more than HTTP/2. And the focus could be on simplifying HTTP instead.