Comment by throwaway189262 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway189262 | Hacker News Reader

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throwaway189262

This discounts the massive cost of switching to HTTP/3 . Plus, increases in internet speed would negate all the gains within a few years.

The massive switching cost of IPv6 has slowed deployment for a decade. Since it's so expensive to switch to HTTP/3, it only benefits large companies like Google. To smaller companies it's a cost.

Only 33% of the web is using HTTP/2, which came out 6 years ago. Any big gains we're talking about are many years in the future when internet speed will be maybe double what it is now. The slow adoption of HTTP/2 relative to its great benefits compared to HTTP/3 shows you how bad adoption will be.

Since 3 is single digits percent better than two, I bet adoption won't cross 20% for almost ten years. It's only going to be the FAANG'S of the world that think such as small increase in performance is worth the switching cost.

So that was kinda a rant but I don't think throwing out big numbers because so many people use the web is a strong argument. Users aren't the ones paying a large cost for a small performance increase

HTTP/1.1 is not being retired though, so I'm not sure I follow the argument about any forced switching cost for small companies. (Which I attempted to cover in my 100k estimate anyways, though you're free to dispute it). Off-the-shelf servers will implement it as an option if you want to turn it on, some clients will support it, and for the rest, status quo should hold? Not for some - e.g. firewall manufactures will presumably have to care - but the vast majority I don't really see being negatively affected by the existence of this standard.

Speed increases will presumably be consumed by continued bloat on part of publishers, as has historically happened in all tech innovations. Which might argue that it doesn't matter regardless and no optimization is ever useful, but that's both defeatist and ignores companies who do care (e.g. CloudFlare), for whom 4% probably matters now and will matter still in a decade.

I think you're seriously underestimating the number of systems that will be forced to deal with HTTP/3 if it's standardized. These days nearly everything uses HTTP. Changing HTTP is almost as big as adding another option to TCP/UDP

Everything that touches HTTP connections. Proxies, transparent proxies, web application firewalls, every network analysis and debugging tool, layer 7 load balancers.

There's probably half a million hardware firewalls out there that won't ever get a software update. As soon as http/3 is released, they're useless. The ones that can be upgraded need downtime and people time to do so. Just in firewalls this change could cost 400 million.

Realistically, the consequences of HTTP/3 will cost billions. Is 4% faster speed worth that? There's a lot of other ways to increase speed 4% without spending any money. Like turning on profile guided optimization in the browser, or just waiting a year for CPU and network speeds to increase that much.

I'm not being defeatist here, a maximum of 4% performance increase is just not very good. Nobody would switch a video or audio codec for a few percent, why is HTTP considered easier?

I say to Google: come back with something better. 20-30%? Totally worth it. If HTTP/2 is truly within 4% of optimal we should never touch it again

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