Abstract
Version 2 of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/2) was finalized in May 2015 as RFC 7540. It addresses well-known problems with HTTP/1.1 (e.g., head of line blocking and redundant headers) and introduces new features (e.g., server push and content priority). Though HTTP/2 is designed to be the future of the web, it remains unclear whether the web will—or should—hop on board. To shed light on this question, we built a measurement platform that monitors HTTP/2 adoption and performance across the Alexa top 1 million websites on a daily basis. Our system is live and up-to-date results can be viewed at [1]. In this paper, we report findings from an 11 month measurement campaign (November 2014 – October 2015). As of October 2015, we find 68,000 websites reporting HTTP/2 support, of which about 10,000 actually serve content with it. Unsurprisingly, popular sites are quicker to adopt HTTP/2 and 31 % of the Alexa top 100 already support it. For the most part, websites do not change as they move from HTTP/1.1 to HTTP/2; current web development practices like inlining and domain sharding are still present. Contrary to previous results, we find that these practices make HTTP/2 more resilient to losses and jitter. In all, we find that 80 % of websites supporting HTTP/2 experience a decrease in page load time compared with HTTP/1.1 and the decrease grows in mobile networks.
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Notes
- 1.
https://www.litespeedtech.com/http2-ready—To their credit, another 27,000 websites powered by LiteSpeed redirect to an error page that loads over H2.
- 2.
We did not find a public explanation of this drop, but we verified it was not measurement error.
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- 4.
- 5.
NGINX 1.9.5 (September 22nd) was sponsored by Automattic, the creators of WordPress. http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES.
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Two sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests provided no support to reject the null hypothesis.
- 7.
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Varvello, M., Schomp, K., Naylor, D., Blackburn, J., Finamore, A., Papagiannaki, K. (2016). Is the Web HTTP/2 Yet?. In: Karagiannis, T., Dimitropoulos, X. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9631. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30505-9_17
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