HTTP2-Optimization-Research

There is a lot of data out there showing off HTTP/1.1 vs HTTP/2 but there isn't anything out there showing off how to actually get peak optimization from your HTTP/2 websites. HTTP2-Optimization-Research goal is to build a way of allow people help find what truly the optimized way is to adapt to HTTP/2!

WE NEED YOUR HELP

The biggest issue we have ran into is the number of variations to websites is more than a group of three university students could handle and we decided to trade your help of getting data with a super easy way of gathering it.

Our findings

We have posted all our findings at our main site

Step 1 - Generate Testing Websites

• We have created a simple bash script that will go and generate various websites along different parameters.
• Since we care about the transferring of data using HTTP/2 only, we find it valid to fill a website with random data as the page's loading is independent of how files are sent across the network.
• The script is incredibly simple to use and more detail can be found in the website generator folder

Step 2 - Gather HTTP/2 Request Data

• After various methods we found that the best way to gather data is to automated the HAR file from the browsers.
  • This decision is made due to lack of support of headless browsers (currently) to collect the data that the network devtools offer
  • For Chrome we ended up using the Chrome Debugging Protocol and the NodeJS API for it and ended up grabbing the HAR file to get the data from our request.
• Our Headless HAR Parser takes a database and the list of sites you want to run against (one is generated automatically in the website generator).
  • Each site it grabs and gets its HAR data where it then parses it and enters all the desired data to the database
  • This is designed to be run as often as you want to gather all the data needed.

Step 3 - Auto Generate Results and Charts from Data

• NOTE: This part is still in the working, but still doesn't prevent you from getting your own data in step 1 and 2
• Once you have the data to make it super easy to analyze it we created a result generator that will take data from the database and create a series of Google Charts.
• The scripts creates each chart as its own html page which can be used to link for reference.
  • You can also easily take the inner data section and combine as please.

Good Additional HTTP/2 Resources

• Videos on what HTTP/2 is all about
  • Slides from Ilya Grigorik
  • Ilya Grigorik's book
  • Surma's Chrome Dev Video
• How to setup HTTP/2
  • Nginx on Ubuntu 16.04