Re: Implementation Notes on Server Push

I don't favor any MUST in the spec about requiring 304s in the first
scenario, but informing people that this is silly would be good :)
Stupid servers will be suboptimal, yes, but if a server has a strong reason
to believe that the next thing the client will be requesting is something
which will be stale, pushing the resource is completely reasonable.
-=R


On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 12:14 PM, Patrick McManus <pmcmanus@mozilla.com>wrote:

> I'm wrapping up a Firefox implementation of spdy/3 server push and wanted
> to provide some ietf level feedback because that mechanism is largely
> intact in the current http2 work in progress draft.
>
>
>    - 304's seem to be a common cause of wasted pushed streams. I would
>    see servers respond with a 304 for index.html and still push 200 responses
>    for a.css and b.js when in a non-push world that would have been either 1
>    or 3 304's. Maybe we should have a rule that you can only push to an
>    assoc-stream of 2xx ?
>    - There is language in the spec that if the client resets a stream
>    that it implicitly resets any associated streams too. That was complicated
>    to implement and pretty much broke my stream state model internally - while
>    researching it it appears that mod_spdy and chrome don't implement it at
>    all. The spec has an editorial note about removing that feature and I favor
>    that removal.
>    - I found flow control for pushed streams immensely helpful. It lets
>    the client bound how much data can be pushed before there is a local GET
>    matched up with that. Relatedly, I changed my default SETTINGS window size
>    from a ~infinite value to be a smaller push-apropos value and then
>    pipelined a window update with each odd SYN_STREAM to make pulled streams
>    ~infinite again while preserving the smaller limit for push and this worked
>    fine with all existing servers to my pleasant surprise. That seems to mean
>    at least the spdy/3 windowing mechanism is simple enough for people to get
>    right.
>    - As with other parts of the spec, I was faced in some implementations
>    with some very large data frames (90+KB) from servers when testing. Such
>    frames are impervious to CANCEL or any mechanism we might use to change
>    priorities driven by the client :(..  HTTP2 is doing the right thing by
>    creating a smallish max frame size.
>
>
> Obviously this is implementation experience with testing and isn't real
> operational experience yet.. that will come.
>
> -P
>