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The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3

engineering.fb.com

61–70 of 149 posts

Re: The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3

#61
For anyone interested, the original design doc for QUIC from 2013 [0]. Really good writeup, both in terms of engineering spec / architectural design. I recommend reading through if you have the time.

[0]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RNHkx_VvKWyWg6Lr8SZ-saqs...

Re: The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3

#62
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, it's very slow for me, and usually triggers warnings from Safari for excess resource consumption.

I think it's extra slow in Safari, for some reason. Just like Google Maps is also slower in Safari than in Chrome. However, overall I would say Safari is the fastest browser out there, based on my own browsing habits. Also most memory efficient.

I've personally experienced this many times using Safari. Pages that take up a lot of memory just straight up freeze and start chugging.

Re: The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3

#63
post #58

I feel like I belong in the minority who like the new Facebook SPA. It loads shockingly fast on my computer, almost instantaneous even

It hangs all the time for me, video scrubbing halts the entire tab, and it uses a lot of CPU sometimes.

Any chance you're using Safari?

Re: The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3

#64

Wow. Now if they could just figure out why my news feed has said "Something Went Wrong" at the bottom for about the last year or so.

Damn I thought it was just me becauseI thought that the Facebook algorithm doesn't have content for me because I don't have friends.

Re: The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3

#65
post #23

Could that explain this : the new UI, appart from being terrible, is often seeing slowdowns for me ?

Possibly, if something in your network is disallowing UDP traffic and the system has to fall back to HTTP over TCP.

oh, so it's fine to degrade HTTP v1 to make v3 look better ?

Re: The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3

#66

Wow. Now if they could just figure out why my news feed has said "Something Went Wrong" at the bottom for about the last year or so.

Damn I thought it was just me becauseI thought that the Facebook algorithm doesn't have content for me because I don't have friends.

I don't think they test at all because... who cares? It's Facebook. You get what you pay for.

Re: The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3

#67
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's extra slow in Safari, for some reason. Just like Google Maps is also slower in Safari than in Chrome. However, overall I would say Safari is the fastest browser out there, based on my own browsing habits. Also most memory efficient.

I've personally experienced this many times using Safari. Pages that take up a lot of memory just straight up freeze and start chugging.

I have a feeling this may be React related. Safari is on average far, far faster on any site. But I have a larger React site that slows down quite a bit more than Chrome.

Perhaps related to the const+let vs var bug the other day.

Re: The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3

#68
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's extra slow in Safari, for some reason. Just like Google Maps is also slower in Safari than in Chrome. However, overall I would say Safari is the fastest browser out there, based on my own browsing habits. Also most memory efficient.

I've personally experienced this many times using Safari. Pages that take up a lot of memory just straight up freeze and start chugging.

I usually get the “this page is using too much memory” warning repeatedly using safari. And apparently there’s no way to make it go away, which is super annoying.

Re: The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3

#69
post #60

Can HTTP/3 be enabled in nginx now? Should it be? Is it a simple config change? I assume that would take care of serving static assets, but would reverse-proxied apps behind nginx also need to be upgraded to HTTP/3?

There are several efforts to implement QUIC and HTTP/3 in nginx. Cloudflare has it deployed in production with quiche[1], and Nginx themselves are developing one[2].

Applications sitting behind a proxy wouldn't need to be updated. The core protocol semantics of HTTP are relatively unchanged between HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and HTTP/3.

[1] https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche

[2] https://www.nginx.com/blog/introducing-technology-preview-ng...

Re: The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3

#70
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly, if something in your network is disallowing UDP traffic and the system has to fall back to HTTP over TCP.

oh, so it's fine to degrade HTTP v1 to make v3 look better ?

It's acceptable to "degrade" a protocol that is only used as a fallback on broken networks if the new protocol is better for your use-case and is available to 99% of users.

Nobody is trying to make v3 "look better." If you use v1, you can continue to use it for a very, very, very long time.

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