NGINX structural enhancements for HTTP/2 performance

Introduction

My team: the Cloudflare PROTOCOLS team is responsible for termination of HTTP traffic at the edge of the Cloudflare network. We deal with features related to: TCP, QUIC, TLS and Secure Certificate management, HTTP/1 and HTTP/2. Over Q1, we were responsible for implementing the Enhanced HTTP/2 Prioritization product that Cloudflare announced during Speed Week.

This is a very exciting project to be part of, and doubly exciting to see the results of, but during the course of the project, we had a number of interesting realisations about NGINX: the HTTP oriented server onto which Cloudflare currently deploys its software infrastructure. We quickly became certain that our Enhanced HTTP/2 Prioritization project could not achieve even moderate success if the internal workings of NGINX were not changed.

Due to these realisations we embarked upon a number of significant changes to the internal structure of NGINX in parallel to the work on the core prioritization product. This blog post describes the motivation behind the structural changes, how we approached them, and what impact they had. We also identify additional changes that we plan to add to our roadmap, which we hope will improve performance further.

Background

Enhanced HTTP/2 Prioritization aims to do Continue reading

Get a head start with QUIC

Today Cloudflare opened the door on our beta deployment of QUIC with the announcement of our test site: cloudflare-quic.com. It supports the latest draft of the IETF Working Group’s draft standard for QUIC, which at this time is at: draft 14.

The Cloudflare Systems Engineering Team has a long history of investing time and effort to trial new technologies, often before these technologies are standardised or adopted elsewhere. We deployed early experiments in standards such as: HTTP/2,
TLS1.3, DNSSEC, DNS over HTTP, Encrypted SNI, when they were still in incubation. We committed to these technologies in their very early stages because we believed that they made for a safer, faster, better internet. And now we’re excited to do the same with QUIC.

In this blog post, we will show you how you can unlock the cloudflare-quic.com achievement and be some of the first people in the world to perform a HTTP transaction over the global internet using QUIC. This will be a moment that you can tell your grandkids about - if they can stop laughing at your stories of cars with wheels and use of antiquated words like: “meme” and Continue reading