The Effects of HTTP Advances on Modern Page Loading

Abstract

Since the dawn of the internet, protocols have seen massive innovations that have improved our experiences. The most prominent of these advances are in the application layer space with HTTP. HTTP has moved from HTTP 1.1 to HTTP 2 and now HTTP 3. The second most prominent occurred one layer higher in the transport layer. The main one being the shift from loss-based congestion control to delay-based congestion control. This paper argues that due to these changes in TCP settings, sometimes, the improvements from HTTP 1.1 to 2 or even 3 have seen lower web performance. Utilizing automated web drivers to load web pages, this paper finds the amount of time it takes to load web pages and quantifies it as a web performance metric. A script is created to crawl through the websites provided and records the amount of time it takes to load the web page’s resources. This paper analyzes 50 websites to start but is able to scale to as many as needed. From these 50 websites, 9 websites perform worse using HTTPS 1, 2 and 3 as the main protocol and 14 websites perform worse using HTTP 1, 2, and 3. This information contradicts some background papers that show a large portion of websites would perform better using HTTP 1 only. However, these papers were concluded many years ago. Since then, web servers have upgraded their servers and protocols have been optimized. In conclusion, this information is useful in understanding how individual web sites interact with the network protocols and can help aid in protocol development.