unclaimed push streams using up the connection window

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/spdy-dev/hz9jp2rZbdQ/33bSPcbNWwwJ has the
full discussion on spdy-dev@.

The short of it is that it's possible for unclaimed push streams to use up
all of the connection window and stall all other streams. This might be due
to a server bug where it is "leaking" the push streams by associating them
to a stream that will never generate requests for the pushed URL. In the
example case, the document simply says "hello world", but it has associated
push streams. Since this document will never generate requests for those
push streams, they are essentially leaked. Furthermore, when the browser
reloads the page, the push streams aren't killed off, so they still suck up
all the connection window which never reopens since nothing is claiming the
stream. So the hello world page hangs on reload.

There are implementation and protocol mitigations here:
1) A browser implementation could track all the associated push streams for
a page and kill them when the page goes away. That's pretty ugly and
violates some layering boundaries between the network stack and the web
rendering engine.
2) If the client push implementation streams the push streams directly into
cache, and manages the cached resources with a cache eviction policy, then
the push streams will not persistently suck up the connection window, since
they will get drained as fast as the cache can consume them.
3) From a protocol standpoint, we could separate push and pull connection
windows so they can be managed separately.

In Chromium's case, I think this will be a non-issue when we change our
push implementation to stream directly to cache. I think this is only an
issue if you have an HTTP/2 implementation that chooses to enable flow
control yet has a naive push implementation.

Originally, I thought this was more interesting to ietf-http-wg@, but maybe
this isn't and implementations will figure it out. I'm not sure if there's
anything for the working group to do here. But I'll send this email out
anyway in case others feel differently.

Cheers.

Received on Monday, 19 May 2014 23:26:32 UTC