Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

engineering.fb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–149 of 149 posts

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

#141

Post by chrismorgan »

chrismorgan wrote: post #125
kelnos wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1 will still be with us for decades; orgs that block UDP will be able to continue to do so, and the rare HTTP/3-only website will just be inaccessible. Even if there's a new killer app that requires QUIC, I imagine an org backward enough to disallow UDP will just not care about that app.

I expect HTTP/2 to disappear completely, to the point of browsers removing support for it probably even within a decade. Everything that works over HTTP/2 should work over HTTP/1.1, even if at a slight cost, and HTTP/3 should be uniformly superior to HTTP/2, except in those rare cases of UDP-blocking firewalls, which situation I expect to improve over time. Given the complexity and maintenance burden of the protocol…

I should also write a dissenting opinion on this point—for each client, the upgrade to HTTP/2 is free, as it’s negotiated via ALPN during the TLS handshake; whereas the HTTP/3 upgrade mechanism isn’t particularly solid yet, requiring an Alt-Svc header on a response from the server, meaning you’ve already had to connect over HTTP/1 or HTTP/2 before you learn you can connect over HTTP/3. There’s also work going on to add a new type of DNS record to indicate that the server is h3-capable, which would allow you to connect over HTTP/3 immediately, but that’s opt-in, and loads of sites that support HTTP/3 will never add that record. So until browsers switch to defaulting to trying HTTP/3, HTTP-over-TCP will continue to be used regularly even when HTTP-over-QUIC is supported, and that means plenty of HTTP/2 will be used until that time. This could keep HTTP/2 alive for a lot longer than the decade I posited. I don’t know how it’ll play out, but I think it will depend on how much browsers decide they want to push HTTP/3; if they push it hard and try it more optimistically, HTTP/2 will die more quickly.

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

#142

Post by [deleted] »

chrismorgan wrote: post #125
kelnos wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1 will still be with us for decades; orgs that block UDP will be able to continue to do so, and the rare HTTP/3-only website will just be inaccessible. Even if there's a new killer app that requires QUIC, I imagine an org backward enough to disallow UDP will just not care about that app.

I expect HTTP/2 to disappear completely, to the point of browsers removing support for it probably even within a decade. Everything that works over HTTP/2 should work over HTTP/1.1, even if at a slight cost, and HTTP/3 should be uniformly superior to HTTP/2, except in those rare cases of UDP-blocking firewalls, which situation I expect to improve over time. Given the complexity and maintenance burden of the protocol…

[deleted]

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

#143

Post by toast0 »

jbjohns wrote: post #134
toast0 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What users are going to notice? Browsers and almost everything else is going to fallback to TCP and move on, because there are too many broken networks to bother. Kind of like how most big sites clamp TCP MSS at 1440 instead of 1460; there's too many PPPoE or IPIP tunneled links with broken path mtu, and too many clients without working/enabler path mtu blackhole detection to bother making a fuss about it. Just move…

I think people will notice as BYOD gets more and more standard. There is already a situation in my company that everyone who is part of the BYOD initiative doesn't even use their company laptop anymore because everything is so much slower.

They might notice and complain if UDP in general is blocked, but if their webpages load, they won't complain that UDP to port 443 is degraded or blocked.

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

#144

Post by thrusong »

harrygeez wrote: post #45

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

Weird. It's incredibly buggy for me.

I get notifications popping up but there's nothing there. Same thing with the messages jewel.

I'll get a notification about a reply to my comment, I'll go to the comment, like it, and then it will scroll me down to the same reply as a top level comment at the bottom of the post.

I've reported all the weirdness I've come across but nothing's changed since I was switched over a month ago.

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

#145

Post by krzyk »

meowtimemania wrote: post #50
krzyk wrote: post #49

Nice, can we now make Facebook look not like it was created in the early 2000? Am I the only one bothered by that? I rarely use Facebook (I used it only when I had to, and never created by own profile, always some temporary ones), so maybe the content is king there, but the UI is very dated.

On which platform is the ui outdated? IMO it looks pretty good

Here is my screenshot: https://imgur.com/17OxohL

It is as if the whole Web 2.0 era forgot about it, all those icons on the left side.

The main part takes only like 30% of the screen estate.

On the other hand, reddit looks good, Google+ looked good. HN looks better.

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

#146

Post by thamer »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #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...

Looks great, thanks for sharing!

How does it compare to the February 2020 standard draft from IETF? [1] I was following the development of the Websocket protocol pretty closely when it happened and had to update my implementation[2] multiple times as the design kept changing. Did this also happen here, or was QUIC pretty much done and standardized straight from the Google design?

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-quic-transport-27

[2] https://github.com/nicolasff/webdis#websockets

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

#147

Post by wilx »

Santosh83 wrote: post #3

By the way, even though it is not yet turned on by default, http3 support is present in Firefox and can be activated by toggling 'network.http.http3.enabled' in about:config to true. I have had it enabled for a few weeks and everything seems okay except that rarely I've noticed a few sites not loading the first time I visit them but needing a 'refresh', but I'm not sure if this is because of the new QUIC code or just…

I see stalls too. I just turned it off and everything seems to work better now.

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

#148

Post by ksec »

harrygeez wrote: post #45

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

On Safari, it feel fast in some places, but there are still many Janks. And no anywhere near as good as the App Experience. Especially in Scrolling and Lots of Imaging.

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

#149

Post by mjoras »

thamer wrote: post #146
lawrenceyan wrote: post #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...

Looks great, thanks for sharing! How does it compare to the February 2020 standard draft from IETF? [1] I was following the development of the Websocket protocol pretty closely when it happened and had to update my implementation[2] multiple times as the design kept changing. Did this also happen here, or was QUIC pretty much done and standardized straight from the Google design? [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft…

There's a lot of significant differences from the original Google QUIC design and what we currently have in the IETF drafts. They are very much wire-incompatible. That's why it took several years for the working group to get to a point where they were near-completion.
Post reply on HN