NGINX Plus now fully supports HTTP/2

NGINX Plus now fully supports HTTP/2

Earlier, we released NGINX Plus R7 that supports HTTP/2. As the latest standard of HTTP protocol, the design of HTTP/2 brings higher performance and security to current web applications. (LCTT: the open-source version of NGINX 1.95 also supports HTTP/2 .)

The HTTP/2 Protocol implemented by NGINX Plus can be seamlessly connected with existing websites and applications. NGINX Plus can provide users with the best experience of HTTP/1.x and HTTP/2 at the same time, regardless of the browser selected by the user.

To support HTTP/2, you only need to use the optional nginx ingress plus ingress http2 package. Nginx strongplus and nginx strongplus extras packages support the SPDY protocol. Currently, it is recommended for production sites because it is supported by most browsers and the code is quite mature.

 

Why HTTP/2?

HTTP/2 makes data transmission more efficient and safer for your applications. Compared with HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2 has five features to improve performance:

• Full reuse-in a keepalive connection, HTTP/1.1 processes requests in strict order. A request must end before the next request starts. HTTP/2 eliminates this requirement and allows parallel and out-of-order requests.

• Single, persistent connection-because HTTP/2 allows full reuse of requests, all objects on the web page can be downloaded in parallel through a single connection. In HTTP/1.x, multiple connections are used to download resources in parallel, resulting in low efficiency of using the underlying TCP protocol.

• Binary encoding-the Header information is sent in a compact binary format instead of a plain text format, saving transmission bytes.

• Header Compression-Headers uses a dedicated HPACK compression algorithm to compress data, further reducing the bytes transmitted over the network.

• SSL/TLS encryption-in HTTP/2, SSL/TLS is mandatory. The RFC does not force HTTP/2 in plain text. However, all Web browsers that implement HTTP/2 currently only support encryption. SSL/TLS can make your website safer and improve the performance of HTTP/2, reducing the performance loss during encryption and decryption.

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