WebPerf Dropbox's HTTP/2 Experience

eva2000 · May 27, 2016

Interesting read Enabling HTTP/2 for Dropbox web services: experiences and observations | Dropbox Tech Blog

At Dropbox, our traffic team recently upgraded the front-end Nginx servers to enable HTTP/2 for our web services. In this article, we would like to share our experiences and findings during the HTTP/2 transition. The overall upgrade was smooth for us, although there are also a couple of caveats that might be helpful to others.

Background: HTTP/2 and Dropbox web service infrastructure
HTTP/2 (RFC 7540) is the new major version of the HTTP protocol. It is based on SPDY and provides several performance optimizations compared to HTTP/1.1. These optimizations include more efficient header compression, server push, stream multiplexing over the same connection, etc. As of today, HTTP/2 is supported by major browsers.

Dropbox uses the open-source Nginx to terminate SSL connections and perform layer-7 load balancing for web traffic. Before the upgrade, our front-end servers ran Nginx 1.7-based software and supported SPDY. Another motivation for the upgrade is that Chrome currently supports SPDY and HTTP/2 but they will be dropping SPDY support on May 15th. If we don’t support HTTP/2 at that time, our Chrome clients would go from using SPDY back to HTTP/1.1.
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