Top all-time · #3468
Bits Up!
Personal blog · bitsup.blogspot.comsystemsweb
Bits Up! is a personal blog at bitsup.blogspot.com about systems and web. Since 2010, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 26 times, most often “HTTP Pipelining aint that Great”. The last post was in 2018, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Bits Up! as a source on browser networking, citing its posts on HTTP/2, SPDY, HTTP pipelining, DNS over HTTPS and certificate handling in threads about those topics.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Real data and musings on the performance of networks, servers, protocols, and their related folks.
Most-linked posts?
- HTTP Pipelining aint that Great3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-11-15
- SPDY: What I Like About You3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-09-23
- The Benefits of HTTPS for DNS2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-05-29
- Opportunistic Encryption for Firefox2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-03-27
- Cache-Control: immutable2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-05-11
- Google fixes nearly decade-old Linux kernel TCP bug2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-09-27
What Hacker News says?
The points you're using to substantiate your argument are not really in line with the facts. Many browsers broadly share a single implementation for huge chunks of the web. Examples off the top of my head include NSS, WebGL, LibPNG, LibJPEG, and WebM. And it's inaccurate to claim WebM is "licensed" from Google; that's no more true than claiming that NSS is "licensed" from Mozilla. Both are open source projects accep…
Comment linking /2011/09/spdy-what-i-like-about-you.html
on “Dart language”Submitted Google fixes nearly decade-old Linux kernel TCP bug as a story · 355 points
HN discussionEverybody is right in this thread :) First, just to avoid confusion, the post linked to this HN article is just about the classic recursive resolver model. That's the scope of what is being experimented with actively. Second, the notion of resolverless dns (where dns records are obtained from somewhere other than your recursive resolver) is indeed something DoH contemplates but does not yet allow. That's because iss…
Comment linking /2018/05/the-benefits-of-https-for-dns.html
on “A cartoon intro to DNS over HTTPS”Submitted SPDY: What I Like About You as a story · 211 points
HN discussionYes. According to Patrick McManus (owner of Gecko's networking stack), 9% of Firefox requests are already using HTTP/2 with the draft implementation enabled for Google (and now Twitter). With Google alone, HTTP/2 usage is already higher than SPDY. http://bitsup.blogspot.com/2015/02/http2-is-live-in-firefox....
Comment linking /2015/02/http2-is-live-in-firefox.html
on “Firefox 36.0 released”Submitted Cache-Control: immutable as a story · 197 points
HN discussionhttps://bitsup.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-benefits-of-https-fo...
Comment linking /2018/05/the-benefits-of-https-for-dns.html
on “Firefox’s Trusted Recursive Resolver DNS feature is dangerous”Submitted Opportunistic Encryption for Firefox as a story · 109 points
HN discussionTreating self-signed HTTPS as HTTP would be a behavior change with subtle implications that are hard to get right. For instance, let's say that I log into https://example.com today, and it has a valid cert (but no HSTS). It sets a cookie with the "HTTPOnly" and "Secure" flags, indicating that it should only be sent over HTTPS, and not exposed to e.g. JS. I come back tomorrow, and https://example.com is now sporting…
Comment linking /2015/03/opportunistic-encryption-for-firefox.html
on “Next Chrome Update Will Block SHA-1 Certificates”Submitted Googling Harder (TCP should be more Aggressive by Default) as a story · 32 points
HN discussionYour theory that it was just malware is easily disproven by reading the bug reports and blog posts from the years people spent trying to make this work. Firefox found far from universal success even after years of testing and blacklisting known-noncompliant servers: http://bitsup.blogspot.com/2012/11/a-brief-note-on-pipelines... (the actual blacklist at the time http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/1d122eaa907…
Comment linking /2012/11/a-brief-note-on-pipelines-for-firefox.html
on “HTTP/2 technology demo”Submitted Trekking the Road from SPDY to HTTP/2 in Firefox as a story · 31 points
HN discussion> The heaviest page, the marketing page, today weighs 110 KB with a cold cache, and 4.6 KB warm. (more comparisons between cold and warm loads) I set HTTP cache-control immutable on my blog's image/JS/CSS URLs this weekend. Cache-Control: immutable tells the browser that this URL will never change, so don't check to see if it has. It should cut down on the warm loads more. If it does change, the timestamp in the URL…
Comment linking /2016/05/cache-control-immutable.html
on “Conservative web development”Submitted On the Merits of QUIC for HTTP as a story · 26 points
HN discussionI didn't have to look hard to find bug reports for pipelining. An example is https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt/+bug/948461 for Amazon's S3. I'd be interested if the problem is still reproducible now. Also, one of the comments mentions Squid 2.0.2 as being buggy. Also, see https://insouciant.org/tech/status-of-http-pipelining-in-chr... for a link to Firefox's blacklist of buggy servers (and a good discuss…
Comment linking /2012/11/a-brief-note-on-pipelines-for-firefox.html
on “KORE – A fast SPDY-capable webserver for web development in C”Submitted HTTP/2 is Live in Firefox as a story · 16 points
HN discussion> By the way, does anyone know why QUIC specifically put NewReno as its official congestion control [0]? Different environments benefit from different algorithms so I don't see why. It's a "reasonable default", in the sense that it normally works quite well, and is easy to implement. The dangerous thing about congestion control is that it's really easy to get it wrong and not notice (as noticing requires performance…
Comment linking /2015/09/thanks-google-tcp-team-for-open-source.html
on “QUIC – Will It Replace TCP/IP?”Submitted SPDY: What I Like About You. as a story · 8 points
HN discussionwhich is to be expected with a TLS connection. OTOH you get to drop all the extra TCP handshakes, you get better congestion control, you get header compression, and that encrypted connection is often a really good thing. http://bitsup.blogspot.com/2011/09/spdy-what-i-like-about-yo... But yes, there remains no silver bullet, and you'll have to pick the right tool for the job.
Comment linking /2011/09/spdy-what-i-like-about-you.html
on “SPDY Brings Responsive and Scalable Transport to Firefox 11”Submitted Smarter Network Page Load for Firefox as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHas anybody used the __builtin_expect feature to good effect? We had been using this extensively in our codebase in places where there is an obvious common "fast path". I tried an experiment where I did a comparison of the __builtin_expect version against a version with our likely/unlikely macros defined to the identity, and I actually saw no difference, which was disappointing. When I did some digging I found this…
Comment linking /2008/04/measuring-performance-of-linux-kernel.html
on “The most useful GCC options and extensions”Submitted Making Firefox Search Snappier as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Benefits of HTTPS for DNS as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Brotli Content-Encoding for Firefox 44 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted HTTP/2 Dependency Priorities in Firefox 37 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted HTTP Pipelining aint that Great as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
