Couple of days ago nginx released nginx-1.10.0 stable version with http2 support.
I was already running nginx from their repos on couple of servers, and as the upgrade was possible just by running apt-get upgrade and adding a single parameter to config file, I decided to give it a try immediately.
I knew http2 use should impact sites with lots of http requests the most, so I compared the results from my hobby site for Latvian gamers – https://exs.lv/ – which has quite a lot of small images and other assets. I removed 3rd party ads so they don’t impact the load times and run couple of tests using gtmetrix.com. The results were pretty impressive for changing a single line of code.
I ran gtmetrix 5 times with http2 enabled, and 5 times without it (with the same nginx version in both cases). There were 101 http requests each run.
Load times without http/2
| run 1 | 8.0s |
| run 2 | 5.2s |
| run 3 | 12.7s |
| run 4 | 7.6s |
| run 5 | 5.1s |
| Average | 7.72s |
Load times with http/2 enabled
| run 1 | 4.8s |
| run 2 | 4.5s |
| run 3 | 4.7s |
| run 4 | 4.7s |
| run 5 | 3.7s |
| Average | 4.48s |
