Understanding the 4 Pillars of HTTP/2

Persistent sessions, multiplexed streams, header compression, and prioritization

The basic principles of Web software architecture that we’ve learned through hard-fought battles is about to enter a whole new era. Node.js back-end engineers and front-end developers need to come to grips with how HTTP/2 reduces the latency of request/response round-trips, and increases overall throughput.

Tangled Web Services has just finished decommissioning all of its HTTP/1.1 servers. Everything is now up and running on fast HTTP/2 servers.

Devin and Ken have been running benchmark tests using the h2load test harness, in order to measure HTTP/2 throughput rates. They've reported their findings in other blog posts. Overall, the results were impressive.

“But what makes it so much faster?” Ernesto asked, to no one in particular. He had a few minutes to spare before the morning scrum, so he began reading the IETF docs. (He’s that kind of nerd.) It wasn’t light reading.

During stand-up, he mentioned to Devin and Ken that he was going to look into speculative push. “I want to see if push can improve our web page loading times,” he announced.

“Cool!” said Devin.