Re: #38 - HTTP2 min value for server supported max_concurrent_streams

On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 3:45 PM, Osama Mazahir <OSAMAM@microsoft.com> wrote:

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> As Martin said, 1 seems overly restrictive.  ****
>
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> My major concern is not the value of the number, but that we have a
> minimum value and the default be the same as the minimum.  Otherwise, we
> leave the race hole open then we are just increasing complexity.
>

Do you feel like the complexity is that bad? In my experience, from
implementing SPDY, it is not.


> ****
>
> **1.       **Client will have to track negative allowance (because it did
> not know how many requests it allowed to send)
>

Isn't this easy? The client always has to track how many outstanding
streams it has in order to respect the limit.


> ****
>
> **2.       **Server has to promise that RST_STREAM due to
> max_concurrent_stream overflow did not have any side effects****
>
> **o   **The server should verb agnostic (i.e. GET vs POST) and just look
> at some streamCount variable.****
>
> **o   **Otherwise, client will have to pend all non-idempotent requests
> until it gets the SETTINGS frame from the server
>

Since RST_STREAM has an error code, this is easy to define.


> ****
>
> **3.       **Client will have to resubmit the request into its queue to
> be sent when the allowance opens up
>
Clients already have to know how to do this due to the GOAWAY race. They
also have to handle this in HTTP/1.X today. For example, if we get an error
when reusing a persistent HTTP connection (e.g. TCP RST), we will resend
the HTTP request over a new connection.

> ****
>
> **4.       **If the “blind” request(s) (i.e. sent before client received
> the SETTINGS frame) have entity-body then client****
>
> **o   **Must wait until the server’s SETTINGS frame before sending
> entity-body OR****
>
> **o   **Be able to regenerate the entity-body when the “blind” request is
> RST_STREAMed****
>
> **§  **This means the layer on top of client stack needs to be able to
> handle a “retry” error and resubmit the entity-body OR****
>
> **§  **The client stack buffers all the entity-body, as it converts it
> into DATA frames, until it knows that the request won’t get RST_STREAM due
> to max_concurrent_stream****
>
> **o   **Or just blow up and complain to the user
>

Again, clients already have to handle this.


> ****
>
> ** **
>
> In general, I would prefer if we made HTTP/2.0 to not have such races to
> begin with instead of piling on complexity to react to the races.
>

As someone with experience implementing a SPDY client, I do not believe
this is a big burden. If you believe it is, I would like to hear why.


> ****
>
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> *From:* willchan@google.com [mailto:willchan@google.com] *On Behalf Of *William
> Chan (???)
> *Sent:* Friday, February 22, 2013 2:36 PM
> *To:* Yoav Nir
> *Cc:* Martin Thomson; Roberto Peon; Osama Mazahir; ietf-http-wg@w3.orgGroup
> *Subject:* Re: #38 - HTTP2 min value for server supported
> max_concurrent_streams****
>
> ** **
>
> We always have to examine what the choices end up being for which parties.
> If servers end up limiting parallelism, or requiring roundtrips to ramp up
> parallelism, then clients which want speed (browsers) will be incentivized
> to simply open up more connections to bypass the low parallelism limit or
> slow start.****
>
> ** **
>
> Overall, I think it's better to tolerate the minor suboptimality of having
> servers RST_STREAM streams if they don't want so much parallelism, rather
> than incentivize browsers to open more connections.****
>
> ** **
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> On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Yoav Nir <ynir@checkpoint.com> wrote:****
>
>
> On Feb 22, 2013, at 6:16 PM, Martin Thomson <martin.thomson@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > On 22 February 2013 05:18, Roberto Peon <grmocg@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Why 1?
> >
> > 1 seems a little restrictive, especially since 6 concurrent
> > connections is the current expectation in many browsers.****
>
> Defaulting to 1 allows for a simple server that never has to handle
> multiple concurrent streams, one that can be implemented with much fewer
> lines of code, but is still compliant. Great for serving software updates,
> large files, CRLs, etc. Not so great for web pages.
>
> Other servers will quickly raise the limit via a SETTINGS frame.
>
> Yoav****
>
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