Benchmark test for concatenation in HTTP/2 environment

This is a companion repo of this article.

Initial setup & installation

First, make sure you have node and npm installed on your machine. Then, run:

git clone https://github.com/gourmetjs/http2-concat-benchmark.git
cd http2-concat-benchmark
npm install
npm run build

NGINX Installation and Config

We ran this benchmark test on AWS EC2 t2.small / Amazon Linux 64-bit.

Currently, the prebuilt NGINX package from Amazon Linux's repo is an older version that doesn't support HTTP/2. We can build the latest version of NGINX from source code as follows:

sudo yum install gcc zlib-devel pcre-devel openssl-devel    # install prerequisites
wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.9.15.tar.gz
tar zxf nginx-1.9.15.tar.gz
cd nginx-1.9.15
./configure --with-http_v2_module --with-http_ssl_module
make
sudo make install

After installation, modify NGINX's configuration file as follows. (Default path is /usr/local/nginx/nginx.conf when you build from source code. REMINDER: Replace www.example.com with your server's hostname.):

worker_processes  1;

events {
  worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
  include       mime.types;
  default_type  application/octet-stream;
  sendfile      on;
  keepalive_timeout  65;

  server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  www.example.com;
    location / {
      root   html;
      index  index.html index.htm;
    }
    error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
        root   html;
    }
  }

  server {
    listen       443 ssl http2;
    server_name  www.example.com;
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/www.example.com/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/www.example.com/privkey.pem;
    ssl_ciphers  HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5;
    location / {
      root   html;
      index  index.html index.htm;
    }
  }
}

After you've finished configuring NGINX, copy the 4 directories in the project folder (1000, 50, 6 and 1) under the _build directory to the NGINX HTML directory, which is /usr/local/nginx/html when you build from source code). You can run:

cp -a ./_build/* /usr/local/nginx/html/

SSL Setup

Because HTTP/2 only works over a HTTPS, you need to install a SSL certificate. Easiest way is to use Let's Encrypt as follows (make sure that NGINX is not running while running this.)

sudo yum install git
git clone https://github.com/certbot/certbot
cd certbot
./certbot-auto certonly --standalone -d www.example.com --debug

Please note that Let's Encrypt doesn't support an IP address or multi-level subdomain like the one AWS gives you (e.g. ec2-nnn-nnn-nnn-nnn.compute-1.amazonaws.com). You need a valid public domain name pointing to the EC2 instance where you are running certbot-auto.

Finish up

Now you can run NGINX:

sudo /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx

To stop:

sudo /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx -s stop

Type in www.example.com (replace with your domain name) and append /1, /6, /50 or /1000 to the URL to see the benchmark loading speed for each corresponding number of bundled assets.

To test HTTP/2, be sure to type https:// before your domain name, and to benchmark HTTP/1.1, just type the domain name as you would normally without https://.