HTTP/3 and QUIC: The New UDP-Based Protocol
There has been a lot of talk about the new Internet protocol HTTP/3 , ever since November 18, 2018 , when the IETF , Internet Engineering Task Force, the body that deals with developing and promoting Internet standards, was in Bangkok to discuss the adoption of the new Internet Draft.
Then the news, on September 27, 2019 : Google , Mozilla and Cloudflare officially announced the adoption of the new HTTP/3 protocol ; it should be noted that Google and Facebook had already previously declared their use of it, respectively since 2015 and 2017.
This marked a decisive change for the web which becomes even more modern , faster and more secure .
Are you interested in knowing how HTTP/3 works , what improvements the new protocol has brought and how to check if it is active ? Then continue reading the article and let's delve into this topic together!
Table of Contents
From HTTP to HTTP/3: How It All Started
The Benefits of HTTP/2
The Disadvantages of HTTP/2
Improvements brought by QUIC
QUIC's goals
What are the benefits of QUIC?
How to check if QUIC is active
HTTP/3 the web of the future has arrived!
From HTTP to HTTP/3: How It All Started
HTTP is an acronym for “HyperText Transfer Protocol,” which is an application-layer protocol used as a system for transmitting information on the web .
The first version of HTTP , as I mentioned, was 0.9 and dates back to the late 80s .
HTTP /1.1 , on the other hand, arrived in 1999 , but it presented a problem called HOLB : Head of Line Blocking : essentially a phenomenon that took place when a list of packets , consisting of a finished and distinct sequence of data transmitted on a network, was blocked by the first one . If there was a slow request then all subsequent ones were penalized and the website was slow .
Since then, numerous improvements have been introduced and have russia phone numbers followed in this order: HTTP/2 , QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) initially developed by Google, and finally HTTP/3 , also known as HTTP-over-QUIC .
The Benefits of HTTP/2
Thanks to HTTP/2 , multiplexing support was introduced , which made it possible to handle multiple requests simultaneously , so that queues did not form. Pages were therefore freed from the constraint of linear download progression .
This way a large javascript resource does not necessarily represent a bottleneck for all the static resources waiting to be downloaded. If you also consider the HPACK compression of the HTTP/2 header and the default binary format for transferring data, you can't help but agree that HTTP/2 is an efficient protocol .
Generally, HTTP/2 works well if there are no connectivity problems , but it is also true that since all requests are sent over a single TCP connection and this does not always have excellent performance, the entire page loading could be affected if the conditions are not optimal.
According to reviews published by Kinsta , HTTP/2 would certainly have brought significant improvements with non-blocking downloads , pipelines , and server push . This way, it was possible to overcome some limitations of the TCP protocol and thus significantly reduce the number of request-response cycles and handshake cycles.
The Disadvantages of HTTP/2
However, it should be noted that the main browser implementations , in order to take advantage of the benefits of HTTP/2, have forced websites to implement SSL encryption and this has caused a computing overload that has not made the advantages related to speed perceptible.
Also, there is no server-push feature for the NGINX implementation . This is a disadvantage because NGINX modules are not like Apache drop-in modules and therefore you cannot copy them , you have to recompile NGINX with them.
The issues mentioned have been resolved and looking at the entire protocol stack, the main constraint is at a lower level than HTTP/2.
Improvements brought by QUIC
QUIC is the successor to HTTP/2 and is the backbone on which HTTP/3 rests (Source: WikiPedia ). Developed by Google around 2012, QUIC was distributed , before the official adoption by major platforms, both in the Chrome browser and on YouTube .
This distribution was essential not only to be able to study and observe the protocol , but also to be able to refine the design before submitting it to the IETF for examination , from which the QUIC Working Group was then formed.
QUIC's goals
But what are the objectives set by QUIC ? The main challenge was to improve the management of connections to resolve any blocks and increase speed , specifically: limit , prevent and make more efficient the sending of data packets , with attention to the parameters related to the response speed.
As for the Round Trip Time , the time between sending a signal plus the time needed to receive the confirmation , if you have an optimal internet connection, the latency between the client and a physically close remote server is between 10-50 ms : each transmitted packet will take this time to be received.
The situation changes if the server contacted is located on another continent and is therefore physically far away or if navigation is done through a mobile operator using slower connections. The result is a latency penalty greater than or equal to 100 ms . All this " because " of the distance to travel.
Not to mention that mobile networks have to endure an additional delay of 100-150 ms (50 ms on 4G/LTE connections) between the phone and the server due to radio frequencies and intermediate networks.
Do hundreds of milliseconds seem insignificant to you? Google doesn't think so, demonstrating through data and statistics how the speed and reactivity of the response are central to a site to guarantee the user a quality User Experience and to not make visitors run away to other sites.
Considering mobile devices for long-distance communications, QUIC , thanks to the difference between unified sending and receiving, allows for savings of hundreds of milliseconds .
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