The upcoming new standard HTTP/2 and its impact on multi-domain websites

Abstract

A brand-new protocol, HTTP/2 is drawing great attention from the web industry as its standard specification is finalized and approved early this year. Since most of its technical features are inherited from SPDY, an application-layer protocol developed by Google, HTTP/2 is expected to solve many of the shortcomings and inflexibilities of HTTP/1.1, and hence enhance the web performance in terms of page load time. In this paper, we study the performance impact of HTTP/2 on typical websites in Korea, where most web pages use many different domains. To mimic the real world, we build a testbed with a web server that natively supports HTTP/2 and emulates different domains on the local system. By using the simple crawling tool and web browser supporting HTTP/2, we clone the several websites and conduct the performance evaluations under the various network environments. Simulation results show how HTTP/2 influence the page load time in typical mobile and PC web sites in Korea.