Also, "relative speeds" should really be "relative times" because otherwise the percentages imply the exact opposite. I was a little confused for a bit by that.
That's because HTTP/2 auto-compounds multiple requests to send in the same connection, thus there is no surprise there.
The main advantage of HTTP/2 is that it ensures that we can get the same benefit of compound data transfers in a completely transparent manner, without bothering to rearchitect how clients and servers operate.
> Considering all the additional complexity that HTTP/2 introduces, that doesn't seem like any improvement.
This assertion completely misses the whole point of HTTP/2, and why it's a huge improvement over HTTP/1.1.
Yea this assertion is spot-on, but sadly HTTP/2 still has enough overhead that if speed really is the most important requirement, compounding data is still better. I was hoping the difference would be at least smaller.
My biggest surprise was that compound requests are still faster, even if they need to send 10 times as much data (the 90% cached case).