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Comment by akmittal | Hacker News Reader

Just saw Hacker news uses http/1.1 and its plenty fast. I wonder if they explored moving to http2/3

I wouldn't expect HN to gain much by moving to HTTP/2 or HTTP/3. Loading this page with a cold cache is just 60kB, divided as 54kB of HTML, 2kB of CSS, and 2kB of JS, plus three tiny images. And on follow-up pageviews you only need new HTML.

If the whole web was like this then we wouldn't need new versions of HTTP, but of course it isn't.

But would it gain something? I'm wondering if HTTP/3 could be enabled in one of my websites, which is even much smaller, and which has no blocking requests. I don't mind if the gains are small, as long as the impact is not negative for most visitors. I'm mostly concerned about some of my visitors visiting the website through an unreliable connection (mobile).

It should gain a small amount; it is a more efficient protocol, with better compression and including 0-RTT for repeat visitors. But I doubt it would be noticeable on such a light site.

The main thing it would get is 2x faster loading on high latency networks (because the TLS handshake happens with the same packets as the QUIC handshake).

Yes, I use this site as the paragon of page weight. When other sites I visit are routinely throwing 200MB (MB!) pages at me, this site is throwing 60KB, of which 54KB is content! It's the benchmark I measure all my design against.

I have exactly the opposite view! HN load is fast but the TTFB is quite slow compared to HTTP/3 websites. On blogs that are using HTTP/3, sometimes I don't see loading time, it's instantaneous. On HN, just checking the dev tools, the TCP+TLS handshake is slower than the time it takes to make DNS request and loading the page data. I think HN would really benefit from using HTTP/3.

HN serves few (if any) images and few (if any) adware, external scripts, or external fonts.

The use case of HTTP2/3 are improvement of typical pages, which trigger dozens or hundreds of requests.

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