Networking Essentials medium
How does HTTP/2 improve performance over HTTP/1.1 for loading a webpage with 50 images?
- A It migrates from the standard TCP transport protocol to a high-speed, connectionless UDP architecture to minimize the overhead of flow control.
- B It utilizes Multiplexing to send dozens of concurrent requests and responses over a single TCP connection, eliminating application-layer head-of-line blocking.
- C It automatically applies advanced lossy compression algorithms to all image assets before they leave the server's persistent storage layer.
- D It relies on a specialized client-side persistent cache that can proactively predict and pre-fetch the most likely requested assets for the current page.
Answer: B. It utilizes Multiplexing to send dozens of concurrent requests and responses over a single TCP connection, eliminating application-layer head-of-line blocking.
In HTTP/1.1, the browser could only request one file at a time over a single TCP connection. To speed things up, browsers would open 6-8 parallel connections. If one connection got stuck (Head-of-Line blocking), the rest of the page would wait. HTTP/2 introduces 'Streams' and 'Multiplexing', allowing the server to interleave data for many different files at once over just one connection. This is much more efficient, though it moves the risk of 'Head-of-Line blocking' from the application layer to the TCP layer: if one packet is lost, the entire TCP stream (and all its multiplexed HTTP requests) will stall until it's recovered.
One system design question a day, with spaced repetition so the ones you miss come back.
Get the appRelated questions
- What is the downside of enabling 'Sticky Sessions' (Session Affinity) on a Load Balancer?
- In WebRTC (P2P Mesh), why is a STUN server required?
- What is the fundamental difference between a Network Switch and a Router?
- In Cloud Networking (AWS), what is the limitation of VPC Peering compared to a Transit Gateway?
- Which protocol is ideal for real-time multiplayer gaming positions or Voice over IP (VoIP), and why?
- What is the purpose of the 'Time To Live' (TTL) field in an IP packet?