From San Francisco to Shanghai, HTTP/3 is very fast!

Hello everyone, I'm Li Shuai from the Microsoft MVP Lab Research Institute in this issue. In the recent June 6th, HTTP/3 has officially released RFC, and whether HTTP/3 using QUIC's new protocol can make the website faster, let's take a look at its performance through the following test .

Researcher at Microsoft MVP Labs

A Brief History of HTTP

The first official version of HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol 1.0) was completed in 1996. But some problems were found, and according to the authors, HTTP/1.0 did not adequately account for layered proxies, caching, the need for persistent connections, and the impact of virtual hosts. So HTTP/1.1 was released a year later, in 1997, and it was also the most widely used version.
In HTTP/1.1, the browser can only download one file at a time through a TCP connection, if a page needs 10 js files, then these files will be downloaded sequentially. The delay of a file will block other content behind, which is what we often call head of line blocking.
After 18 years, the HTTP protocol ushered in an update, HTTP/2 (RFC 7540) was released. A big feature of HTTP/2 is multiplexing. The binary frame and stream mechanism is introduced, allowing the use of a single TCP connection to download resources in parallel through Stream, which improves transmission efficiency.
In addition, there is a header compression HPACK algorithm to reduce the transmission of repeated header data.

However, although HTTP/2 solves the head-of-line blocking of HTTP, it will still be affected by the head-of-line blocking of TCP.
In fact, in environments with high packet loss, HTTP/1.1 performs better because the browser opens multiple parallel TCP connections!

▌True multiplexing with HTTP/3 and QUIC

The main difference between HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 is the transport protocol they use. HTTP/3 uses the new QUIC protocol to replace the TCP protocol, and QUIC is developed based on UDP. Unlike TCP, UDP does not require a three-way handshake. Combined with TLS1.3, it also brings the possibility of 0-RTT encrypted transmission. HTTP /3 also brings a new header compression algorithm, QPACK.

Test content

▌Site

A front-end static site contains 10 js files, 19 images, some css and fonts, a total of 36 resources, and a total size of 6.6 M.

▌Server

Azure Standard B2s, 2 Core 4G, Linux (Ubuntu 20.04), Web
The server uses Caddy (I tried nginx before, but now I need to compile the code of nginx-quic to use HTTP/3. After tossing around, there are still problems, so I gave up), in contrast, Caddy is simple to open HTTP/3, and automatically https certificates are also handy. Also set Cache-Control: "no-store", disable cache,
HTTP/3 has 0-RTT set.

▌Location

The client is located in Shanghai, and the server is located in San Francisco, USA, and the distance between the two places is about 10,000 kilometers.

▌Three versions
HTTP/1.1: https://sfh1.lixiaoshuai.com/
HTTP/2: https://sfh2.lixiaoshuai.com/
HTTP/3: https://sfh3.lixiaoshuai.com/

Each site was visited 10 times using Chrome, and the time was recorded.

Test Results

Finally, let's take a look at the test results. HTTP/1.1 averages 3500 ms, HTTP/2 averages 2500 ms, and HTTP/3 averages 1300 ms. It can be seen that the performance improvement brought by HTTP/3 is still obvious.

Summarize

On June 6 of this year, the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force)
Officially released the RFC for HTTP/3. The complete RFC is more than 20,000 words and explains HTTP/3 in great detail.

As you can see, HTTP/3 is fast! Large companies like Google and Facebook are already using HTTP/3 for their services, and web servers are actively embracing the new protocol and providing experimental support. And can QUIC replace the decades-old TCP? Let's wait and see!

Related Links

https://kinsta.com/blog/http3/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2#Criticisms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/3

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