Push is faster than pull, HTTP/2 server push

aruntt’apxsmawa munat kullaka,

I am currently playing around with HTTP/2 and trying to figure out if and what performance benefits it brings. One interesting feature I found is the possibility to push data from the server via an open connection to the client kinda substituting web sockets.

Interesting feature to build new things and as this weeks paper points out, it might even be improving your website performance if you utilize it.


Abstract:

In HTTP/1.1, it is necessary for the client to request an object (e.g. an image in a page) in order for the server to send it, even if the server knows in advance what the client will need. Server Push is a feature introduced in HTTP/2 that promises to improve page load times (PLT) by having the server push content to the browser in advance. In this paper, we investigate the benefits and challenges of using Server Push on mobile devices. We first examine whether pushing all content or just the CSS and Javascript files performs better, and find the former leads to much better web performance. Also, we find that sites making use of domain sharding or which otherwise have content divided across many servers do not benefit
much from Server Push, a major challenge for Server Push going forward. Network performance characteristics also play a major role. Server Push is especially effective at improving performance at high loss rates (16% median PLT reduction with a 2% loss rate) and high latencies (14% PLT reduction with 100 ms latency), and has little benefit for high-speed Ethernet connections. This motivates its use on mobile devices, although we also find the limited processing power of these devices limits the benefits of Server Push. Server Push also offers modest energy benefits, with energy savings of 9% on LTE for one device. Overall, Server Push is a
promising approach for improving web performance in mobile networks, but there are a number of challenges in achieving the full benefits of Server Push.

Download Link:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3038912.3052574


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