Is HTTP/2 Worth It? Benefits, Drawbacks, and Future Outlook

This chapter concludes a series on HTTP/2 by sharing personal insights on its concepts and future prospects.

HTTP/2 New Features

Binary framing (HTTP Frames)

Multiplexing

Header compression

Server Push

Advantages of HTTP/2

Lower latency through multiplexing and RTT optimization

Reduced bandwidth usage via header compression (HPACK)

Fewer connections needed thanks to binary framing and multiplexing

Bandwidth and latency directly affect page load times; under 5 Mbps the impact is significant, while above 5 Mbps the effect diminishes. Reducing RTT improves user experience, but many HTTP/1.1 optimizations (domain sharding, CSS sprites) already mitigate latency, lessening HTTP/2's edge.

Connection‑count reduction offers a clear benefit by easing server load, though the gain for well‑funded internet companies is modest.

The Server Push feature appears promising for faster resource delivery, yet in practice static assets are often served from separate domains via CDNs, making push less useful. Effective push also requires careful cache handling, which lacks mature server‑side tooling.

Implementing a full HTTP/2 reverse proxy is complex due to stream state management. Nginx currently does not plan upstream HTTP/2 support, and the most complete library, nghttp2 , only partially supports proxying and lacks full Server Push capabilities. The nghttpx proxy example shows that a request to /push still returns “not supported”.

In summary, HTTP/2 has advantages, but against a well‑optimized HTTP/1.x stack its impact is limited; widespread adoption may require abandoning many existing optimizations, which many teams are reluctant to do. Nonetheless, as major internet players and tooling improve, HTTP/2 is likely to grow.

Current observation (as of 2018-08-25 21:36:22 ): major Chinese portals still use HTTP/1.1, though they have switched to HTTPS.

References

RFC7540

RFC7540 UI‑styled version

http2 GitBook (Chinese)

HTTP/2 Frequently Asked Questions

http2 related tools

Stream state machine (important)

A fork of /x/net/http2 providing Server Push for Go

http2 server push overview video

High Performance Browser Networking (O'Reilly)

HTTP/2 is here, let’s optimize!