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insouciant.org
Personal blog · insouciant.org/tech · on HN as hobohackerwebprogramming
insouciant.org is a personal blog at insouciant.org about web and programming. Since 2012, 20 different Hacker News readers have linked it 31 times, most often “Network Congestion and Web Browsing”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link insouciant.org for posts on web networking performance, covering HTTP/2, SPDY, HTTP pipelining, TCP congestion from many connections, and SSL performance. Commenters cite it as support for their points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Network Congestion and Web Browsing4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2013-05-20
- Status of HTTP pipelining in Chromium4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2013-01-21
- Prioritization Only Works When There's Pending Data to Prioritize (2014)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-06-14
- HTTP/2 Considerations and Tradeoffs3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-01-10
What Hacker News says?
The specification indeed is about proxying http resources, not https ones. So it's not initially as alarming as some other proposals discussing trusting proxies to intercept SSL connections. For more details, you can refer to https://insouciant.org/tech/http-slash-2-considerations-and-... . This specific proposal is interesting because it specifically is related to opportunistic encryption proposals, in particular,…
Comment linking /tech/http-slash-2-considerations-and-tradeoffs/
on “One of the Most Alarming Internet Proposals I've Seen”Submitted Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service as a story · 164 points
HN discussionHTTP/2 does not change the meaning of http:// . That's the opportunistic encryption proposal: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-httpbis-alt-svc-... . For more information, you can see https://insouciant.org/tech/http-slash-2-considerations-and-... .
Comment linking /tech/http-slash-2-considerations-and-tradeoffs/
on “One of the Most Alarming Internet Proposals I've Seen”Submitted SSL Performance Case Study as a story · 52 points
HN discussionAt least if you're going to dive into the transport layer, pick a capability that hasn't been added and then unceremoniously backed out- https://insouciant.org/tech/status-of-http-pipelining-in-chr... SPDY begins to offer some very appealing alternatives where when sending a document the transport can push all of the individual dependent documents. It really does fix things, begins pushing all the data at once, in a…
Comment linking /tech/status-of-http-pipelining-in-chromium/
on “JSON API”Submitted HTTP/2 Considerations and Tradeoffs as a story · 35 points
HN discussionTo answer your specific question about why not in TCP, it's not deployable. Here's why: * In order to get multiplexing and other features introduced with HTTP/2, you need to change protocol framing. However, this means that the protocol is no longer backwards compatible. There are many ways to roll out non-backwards-compatible changes, but for TCP, they were deemed unacceptable. For example, you could negotiate the…
Comment linking /tech/http-slash-2-considerations-and-tradeoffs/
on “RFC 7540 – HTTP2”Submitted HTTP/2 Considerations and Tradeoffs as a story · 7 points
HN discussionWhile I agree QUIC is a better long term solution[1], saying TCP ordering affects HTTP/2 is misleading. It is true, but it is quite easy to avoid bad behavior by using TCP_NOTSENT_LOWAT (also created by Google), to avoid HoL blocking. For example, SPDY had a similar problem which was ameliorated by only sending when the water mark is low enough: https://insouciant.org/tech/prioritization-only-works-when-t... [1] htt…
Comment linking /tech/prioritization-only-works-when-theres-pending-data-to-prioritize/
on “TCP BBR congestion control comes to GCP”Submitted Network Congestion and Web Browsing as a story · 7 points
HN discussionWill Chan of Chromium wrote a good post explaining the congestion issues with opening many TCP connections - https://insouciant.org/tech/network-congestion-and-web-brows...
Comment linking /tech/network-congestion-and-web-browsing/
on “Http2 explained”Submitted Prioritization Only Works When There's Pending Data to Prioritize (2014) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionWhy do you assert it has no benefit for mobile APIs? Here are a few that I can think of off the top of my head: * SPDY Multiplexing is superior to HTTP pipelining. Pipelining requires in-order responses, which leads to head of line blocking. * SPDY header compression is a win for mobile, since mobile uplink bandwidth is often a bottleneck. Request header compression allows for fitting more requests into fewer packet…
Comment linking /tech/connection-management-in-chromium/
on “HN supports SPDY”Submitted Status of HTTP pipelining in Chromium as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMultiple parallel connections increases the likelihood of packet loss due to network congestion, is also imposes a larger load on servers and intermediate proxies. A TCP handshake has to take place for each connection and this isn't cost free, and there's the SSL negotiations on top (though techniques like OCSP stapling help) Going massively parallel isn't free - Will Chan of Chrome did a good write up here: https:/…
Comment linking /tech/network-congestion-and-web-browsing/
on “HTTP/2: The Long-Awaited Sequel”Submitted Network Congestion and Web Browsing as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI see, so your main point really is that you don't think the new features proposed in HTTP/2.0 are worth the change in wire representation. Prioritization: Generally speaking, documents (HTML) > script/stylesheets (JS&CSS) > subresources (e.g. images). https://insouciant.org/tech/resource-prioritization-in-chrom... https://insouciant.org/tech/throttling-subresources-before-f...
Comment linking /tech/throttling-subresources-before-first-paint/
on “Speeding up HTTP with minimal protocol changes”Submitted Connection Management in Chromium as a story · 2 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 /tech/status-of-http-pipelining-in-chromium/
on “KORE – A fast SPDY-capable webserver for web development in C”Submitted LocalStorage DB size and load times in Chrome as a story · 2 points
HN discussionTo your points about pipelining, there's a reason it doesn't get compared. It's not usable - https://insouciant.org/tech/status-of-http-pipelining-in-chr... Head of line blocking is so well documented that there are many common web performance techniques to get around it, like domain sharding: http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/05/12/sharding-dominan... . It'd be very interesting to see where you get your data th…
Comment linking /tech/status-of-http-pipelining-in-chromium/
on ““SPDY does not clearly outperform HTTP over cellular networks” [pdf]”Submitted GMail web performance optimisation actually slower. as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://insouciant.org/tech/network-congestion-and-web-brows... had me thinking the same thing: useful post, better with a text-only view.
Comment linking /tech/network-congestion-and-web-browsing/
on “Apple Is Using Sass, And They’re Doing It Wrong”Submitted Prioritization Only Works When There's Pending Data to Prioritize as a story · 1 points
HN discussionNotice it says "on average". SPDY isn't a switch you flip on to make things faster. Very often, there are low-hanging fruits for performance improvement, especially in SSL: https://insouciant.org/tech/ssl-performance-case-study
Comment linking /tech/ssl-performance-case-study
on “HTTP 2.0 Draft – SPDY Protocol”Submitted HTTP/2 Considerations and Tradeoffs as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis was on HN eight months ago, when the post was actually made. And the takeaway is pretty clear, you probably won't see a benefit in using SPDY in front of a site optimized in ways that don't take advantage of SPDY's strengths. If you want to see big improvements with SPDY (like Google does) then you need to adjust how you're serving your resources. Resource prioritization is a perfect example of this: https://in…
Comment linking /tech/prioritization-is-critical-to-spdy/
on “Not as SPDY as You Thought”That would apply but it's somewhat odd to see the tone of surprise for something which has been widely mentioned as an optimization-turned-antipattern for SPDY or HTTP/2 since at least 2012 or so. I believe at least Chrome has also optimized so addresses which share the same IP (or SSL cert?) will be collapsed into the same existing connection rather than opening new ones. Opening all of those connections is also so…
Comment linking /tech/network-congestion-and-web-browsing/
on “The Effect of Network and Infrastructural Variables on SPDY’s Performance (2014)”
