This lecture continues our discussion on techniques to reduce Web latency. In our last lecture, we studied network-based techniques to reduce Web latency, and in this lecture we will study common end-node techniques, i.e., techniques that mainly concern Web clients and servers.

Course lecture: Techniques to Reduce Web Latency – Part II

Related readings

Although a bit dated, the first article, “SPDYing up the web”, provides an excellent overview of SPDY, the predecessor of HTTP/2, and the thoughts that underlie HTTP development from version 1.1 to version 2. The second article, “Overview of HTTP/2”, surveys HTTP/2 and evaluates its performance against HTTP/1.1. Finally, the third article, “HTTP/3: the past, the present, and the future”, offers a succinct yet relatively complete description of the successor to HTTP/2 — HTTP/3.

• Bryce Thomas, Raja Jurdak, and Ian Atkinson. 2012. “SPDYing up the web. Commun”. ACM 55, 12 (December 2012), 64-73. (Instructions for how to access)
• Anne-Sophie Brylinski and Aniruddha Bhattacharjya. 2017. “Overview of HTTP/2”. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Internet of things, Data and Cloud Computing (ICC ’17). ACM, New York, NY, USA. (Instructions for how to access)
• Alexandro Ghedini and Rustam Lalkaka. The Cloudflare Blog. “HTTP/3: the past, the present, and the future”.

Other recommended readings include:

• High Performance Browser Networking. O’Reilly. “Brief History of HTTP”.
• Daniel Stenberg. 2014. “HTTP2 explained”. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 44, 3 (July 2014), 120-128.
• Factory.hr. “HTTP/2: the difference between HTTP/1.1, benefits and how to use it”.
• J. Garza. The Akamai Blog. “A QUICk Introduction to HTTP/3”.
• Daniel Stenberg. “HTTP/3 explained”. Open access book.
• The Cloudflare blog. “HTTP/3: From root to tip”.
• Martino Trevisan, Danilo Giordano, Ali Safari Khatouni. “Measuring HTTP/3: Adoption and Performance”. 19th Mediterranean Communication and Computer Networking Conference (2021).
• Mohammad Rajiullah, Per Hurtig, Anna Brunstrom, Andreas Petlund, and Michael Welzl. 2015. “An Evaluation of Tail Loss Recovery Mechanisms for TCP”. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 45, 1 (January 2015), 5-11. (Instructions for how to access)