HTTP/2 Demo: Under the Hood

At first glance, the potential performance improvements of HTTP/1.1 versus HTTP/2 on our demo page may seem a bit hard to believe. So, we put together a technical explanation of how this demo actually works. We’d also like to credit the Gophertiles demo, which served as a basis for our own HTTP/2 demo.

Overview

A web page can only be served over either HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2—mixing protocols is not allowed. Our demo page is HTTP/2-enabled, so there’s no way to load HTTP/1.1 content directly on the same page. Inline frames (iframes) can be used to solve this issue. We embedded two iframes on our demo page, both containing the same source code. The key difference is that one iframe loads over an HTTP/1.1 CDN while the other loads over an HTTP/2 CDN.

We chose Amazon CloudFront for the HTTP/1.1 CDN because it can only serve content over HTTP/1.1. For the HTTP/2 CDN, we’re using our own HTTP/2-enabled network. You can take a look at the individual HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 iframe content, which should have similar load times to the side-by-side example on our demo page.

Iframe Content

So, what is contained in Continue reading