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performancetomcatprofilinghttp2
Murtuza Talwari
Murtuza Talwari

Reputation: 21

Measure Performance Enhancement using HTTP2

I am using Tomcat 8.5.29 and using the respective configuration, i have enabled the HTTP2 support for the site. Below is the configuration in server.xml file.

<Connector port="443" protocol="org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11AprProtocol"
           maxThreads="150" SSLEnabled="true" 
           compressableMimeType="text/html,text/xml,text/plain,text/css,text/javascript,application/javascript,application/json" compression="on" compressionMinSize="1024"
           >
    <UpgradeProtocol className="org.apache.coyote.http2.Http2Protocol" />
    <SSLHostConfig>
        <Certificate certificateKeyFile="conf/localhost-key.pem"
                     certificateFile="conf/localhost-cert.pem"
                     certificateChainFile="conf/cacert.pem"
                     type="RSA" />
    </SSLHostConfig>
</Connector>

When i tried to compare the page load time for the site which is supporting HTTPS 1.1 and HTTP2, it is not consistent. Sometime it is taking more time to load and sometime it is taking less time to load compare to HTTPS 1.1.

To measure the page load time i am using httpwatch.

I am looking for information on

A) Which are the tools can be used to measure the performance enhancement using http2 ? Our is not public website so cant use the some of the tool available online.

B) Are there any other configuration needs to be done apart from enabling the HTTP2 in tomcat to get the better result ?

Regards,

Upvotes: 1

Views: 456

Answers (1)

Barry Pollard
Barry Pollard

Reputation: 46040

HTTP/2 aims to address some inefficiencies of loading many resources over HTTP by changing to a binary format with multiplexing.

Under HTTP/1, requesting many resources over a high latency, long distant network (as much of the Internet is) means downloading website assets are slower than they need to be. This is because each HTTP/1.1 connection can only handle one resource at a time and cannot use that connection to handle another request while it’s waiting around for the first to be sent back.

So for your use case I am presuming this is on an intranet and the servers are probably located quite close to you with high speed links to them? If so HTTP/2 is unlikely to give you a huge performance boost to be honest, as the resources will likely be sent back quite quickly anyway. So I am not surprised that you are not seeing improvements for this scenario.

Additionally downloading multiple assets is only one part of using a website. If the website requires a lot of server side processing to produce then the downloading side (which HTTP/2 should improve) may be such a small part of the load time that it might be negligible and even drastic improvements to that might be unnoticeable. Similarly if the website is slow even after downloading (because it uses a tonne of JavaScript for example) then that’s not going to be fixed by moving to HTTP/2.

To me HTTP/2 makes more sense for serving static resources (images, CSS and JavaScript) than dynamic resources from an application server (Java based or otherwise) so I’m not convinced there is a real pressing need for HTTP/2 on Tomcat and the like. Even if you are using Tomcat to serve static resources you’re probably better sticking a faster HTTP/2 webserver (Apache, Nginx) in front of it and offloading them to that and only proxying genuinely dynamic content on to Tomcat.

So while HTTP/2 is a great improvement to the protocol (for most cases), it is not a magic fix to make your site 10 times faster. Saying that HTTP/2 is the future IMHO so there is little reason not to move to it (the primary one being lack of support of HTTP/2 in many implementations - especially if running older versions of server software, but you’ve already solved that issue).

Anyway, back to your question: The easiest way I would suggest would be to use developer tools in browser to see how long it takes to load he site with and without HTTP/2 - that’s ultimately what your users are experiencing. If you can do this programmatically (e.g. record the time taken to fully load the page with JavaScript and report that back some how) to allow for larger scale analysis then so much the better. This takes a bit more setup than running something like Apache’s ab tool or the like, but those won’t triply measure the improvements due to HTTP/2 if they are only downloading the main page and not the resources, and also won’t measure the whole load time the user experiences.

Upvotes: 2

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