Re: Proposal - Reduce HTTP2 frame length from 16 to 12 bits

Can you clarify what you mean by a documented performance metric for
non-browser use cases? I don't think Patrick said anything browser
specific. He provided some serialization latency numbers and noted that
they are high enough to impact responsiveness. And then he provided numbers
on overhead.

I, for one, find the responsiveness argument compelling for browsers. I'm
not completely sure 0.2% is low enough overhead for everyone, but I
wouldn't complain about it. And in absence of complaints, I guess I'd
support moving forward with only 12 bits for length.


On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 9:22 AM, James M Snell <jasnell@gmail.com> wrote:

> Currently, my only challenge with this is that, so far, we have not
> seen any documented performance metrics for non-browser based uses.
> .That said, I don't really have the time currently to put together a
> comprehensive set of such metrics so it wouldn't be polite of me to
> insist on them ;-) ... perhaps for now we ought to keep the 16-bit
> size but include a recommendation about not exceeding 12-bits, then
> see what more implementation experience does for us.
>
> On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 7:20 AM, Patrick McManus <mcmanus@ducksong.com>
> wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > I've been looking at a lot of spdy frames lately, and I've noticed what I
> > consider a common implementation problem that I think a good http/2 spec
> > could help with. I'm commonly seeing frames large enough to interfere
> with
> > effective prioritization. I've seen this from at least 3 different
> servers.
> >
> > The HTTP/2 draft has a max frame size of 16 bits, which is a huge
> > improvement from spdy's 24. I propose we reduce it further to 12. (i.e.
> 4096
> > bytes).
> >
> > The muxxed approach of multiple streams onto one connection done in
> HTTP/2
> > has great advantages, but the one downside of it is that it creates head
> of
> > line blocking problems between those streams dictated by frame
> granularity.
> > With small frames this is pretty manageable, with extremely large ones
> we've
> > recreated the same head of line problems that HTTP/1 pipelines have. The
> > server needs to  be able to respond quickly to higher priority events
> > (including cancellations) and once it has written a frame header to the
> wire
> > it is committed to the entire frame for how ever long it takes to
> serialize
> > it. IMO the shorter that time, the better.
> >
> > Our spec can help implementations do the right thing here by limiting the
> > max frame size to 12 bits.
> >
> > It takes 500msec to serialize 64KB at 1Mbit/sec... 125msec at 4Mbit/sec.
> > Those are some pretty notable task-switch times. Dropping the frame to
> 4096
> > cuts them to 32msec and 8 msec.. that's much more responsive, at the
> cost of
> > 120 extra bytes of transfer (< 1msec at 1Mbit/sec).
> >
> > In general - the smaller the better as long as the overhead doesn't get
> to
> > be too large. At 8 in 4096 (~.2%) I think that's acceptable. Its roughly
> the
> > same overhead as a VLAN tag.
> >
> > Obviously this makes a continuation bit for control frames absolutely
> > mandatory, but I think we're already in that spot with 16 bit frame
> lengths.
> >
> > -Patrick
> >
> >
>
>