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The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection (2009)

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Re: The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection (2009)

#32

In addition to this, with SPDY around, these first milliseconds are becoming even more important. Since SPDY requires some sort of negotiation between server and client to agree they both support the protocol, this creates a problem for the first request: how do you know a server supports SPDY without having seen a response from said server? Note that the regular HTTP Accept negotiation is not enough since the browse…

SPDY requires that you run it inside TLS. Within the already existing TLS handshake the client and server can advertise that they support SPDY instead of HTTP.

The way you describe it comes of as more complicated?!

Of the things to note is that nothing of SPDY describes encryption, which is why a lot of people have thought about using it without TLS via some other negotiation strategy (but nobody have really implemented this, since the value is only minor/non-existent outside internal networks).

Re: The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection (2009)

#33

This reminds me of an old project. Explain all the bits that are communicated and computed across all APIs involved, when a user presses a key, and a set of pixels appear on the screen spelling "a".

Could someone point to a resource that would explain what happens when Im viewing a website on my phone driving down the highway?

What does my cellphone send to the nearest cell-phone tower? What does the cell-phone tower send to the phone company servers? How do they tie back together packets coming back from https://news.ycombinator.com back to my phone?

Re: The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection (2009)

#34

Nice analysis. But why is this trending now? This is from 2009.

Discovered or rediscovered by someone, and seemingly new to some on here or still appreciated by enough others to upvote.

FWIW, it was the first time I'd seen it. Very comprehensive.

Re: The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection (2009)

#35
post #5
post #3

Previous discussion (2009): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=650914

Yep, sorry for the repost. I figured that enough time had passed since the last time since it's such an excellent article. ;-)

No apologies necessary, thanks for this!

Re: The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection (2009)

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About twenty years ago, I was able to do something pretty much like this for typing "cat file" - e.g. syscall interface, tty drivers, network protocols, filesystems, SCSI plus pervasive things like schedulers and memory managers. I can't do that any more, though, because I've become more of a storage specialist and some of the parts I haven't kept with have changed immensely. Also, some of the implementations of thos…

I wouldn't mind seeing that, even for a 20 year old system.

Ditto. I'd still love to see whatever tidbits are available if only for historic reasons, which in itself is quite valuable. Might be also fun to see a before and after if someone else does an up to date version too.

Re: The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection (2009)

#37

This reminds me of an old project. Explain all the bits that are communicated and computed across all APIs involved, when a user presses a key, and a set of pixels appear on the screen spelling "a".

Could someone point to a resource that would explain what happens when Im viewing a website on my phone driving down the highway? What does my cellphone send to the nearest cell-phone tower? What does the cell-phone tower send to the phone company servers? How do they tie back together packets coming back from https://news.ycombinator.com back to my phone?

If it's you driving, you put down the phone and pay attention to the road. :)

Re: The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection (2009)

#38
post #32

In addition to this, with SPDY around, these first milliseconds are becoming even more important. Since SPDY requires some sort of negotiation between server and client to agree they both support the protocol, this creates a problem for the first request: how do you know a server supports SPDY without having seen a response from said server? Note that the regular HTTP Accept negotiation is not enough since the browse…

SPDY requires that you run it inside TLS. Within the already existing TLS handshake the client and server can advertise that they support SPDY instead of HTTP. The way you describe it comes of as more complicated?! Of the things to note is that nothing of SPDY describes encryption, which is why a lot of people have thought about using it without TLS via some other negotiation strategy (but nobody have really implemen…

How does what I describe differ from SPDY using a TLS handshake as advertising SPDY support? In any case, it was my intention to explain exactly that.

Re: The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection (2009)

#39
post #32

In addition to this, with SPDY around, these first milliseconds are becoming even more important. Since SPDY requires some sort of negotiation between server and client to agree they both support the protocol, this creates a problem for the first request: how do you know a server supports SPDY without having seen a response from said server? Note that the regular HTTP Accept negotiation is not enough since the browse…

SPDY requires that you run it inside TLS. Within the already existing TLS handshake the client and server can advertise that they support SPDY instead of HTTP. The way you describe it comes of as more complicated?! Of the things to note is that nothing of SPDY describes encryption, which is why a lot of people have thought about using it without TLS via some other negotiation strategy (but nobody have really implemen…

Why not use the HTTP protocol switch thing that WebSocket uses?
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