Tag: web development

Hello HTTP/2, Goodbye SPDY

Chromium blog reports that by the early next year, Chromium (and Chrome) will phase out the support for SPDY and NPN in favor of HTTP/2 and ALPN.

HTTP is the fundamental networking protocol that powers the web. The majority of sites use version 1.1 of HTTP, which was defined in 1999 with RFC2616. A lot has changed on the web since then, and a new version of the protocol named HTTP/2 is well on the road to standardization. We plan to gradually roll out support for HTTP/2 in Chrome 40 in the upcoming weeks.

HTTP/2’s primary changes from HTTP/1.1 focus on improved performance. Some key features such as multiplexing, header compression, prioritization and protocol negotiation evolved from work done in an earlier open, but non-standard protocol named SPDY. Chrome has supported SPDY since Chrome 6, but since most of the benefits are present in HTTP/2, it’s time to say goodbye. We plan to remove support for SPDY in early 2016, and to also remove support for the TLS extension named NPN in favor of ALPN in Chrome at the same time. Server developers are strongly encouraged to move to HTTP/2 and ALPN.

MySQL view processing algorithms

I had a last work session last night, troubleshooting one of the project’s database performance issues.  Without giving more details (at least for now), I want to save the link to MySQL view processing algorithms for future me.

For UNDEFINED, MySQL chooses which algorithm to use. It prefers MERGE over TEMPTABLE if possible, because MERGE is usually more efficient and because a view cannot be updatable if a temporary table is used.

A reason to choose TEMPTABLE explicitly is that locks can be released on underlying tables after the temporary table has been created and before it is used to finish processing the statement. This might result in quicker lock release than the MERGE algorithm so that other clients that use the view are not blocked as long.

A particular heavy query, using views, kept going into “Copying to tmp table” state, locking up the server and slowing everything to a crawl.  Upon closer examination, the view was created without specifying the algorithm (UNDEFINED).  Changing the view to use TEMPTABLE made everything so much faster.

I knew there were reasons for me being against using views in MySQL, but I could never remember them.  This is one.  Views not supporting indexes is another.