Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

On TLS performance

We have deployed TLS at a large scale using both hardware and software load balancers. We have found that modern software-based TLS implementations running on commodity CPUs are fast enough to handle heavy HTTPS traffic load without needing to resort to dedicated cryptographic hardware. We serve all of our HTTPS traffic using software running on commodity hardware.

Doug Beaver, Facebook
HTTP2 Expression of Interest

http2 explained

http2 explained – This document describes http2 at a technical and protocol level. Background, the protocol, the implementations and the future.

Some highlights:

  • The http2 spec is expected to ship in June 2014 (a month or two away!)
  • http2 is heavily based on Google’s SPDY
  • http2 is binary
  • http2 fixes a lot of issues with HTTP 1.1 (pipelining, head of line blocking, etc)
  • http2 brings new features (server push, block, reset)
  • http2 will keep the URL schemes (http and https)
  • http2 will mostly be implemented for https (via protocol negotiations in TLS)
  • http2 already has a variety of implementations: Firefox and Google Chrome (MSIE coming), cURL, Goolge, Twitter, Facebook.  Apache and Nginx expected.