Test with and without HTTP/2

[nilskuhn]

Hi there,

I want to test a site capable of HTTP/2 with HTTP/2 and without (HTTP 1.1) to see the differences in performance, session handling and so on.

I try to disable HTTP/2 via setting a firefox preference in test script:

Code:

firefoxPref    network.http.spdy.enabled.http2    false
navigate    https://www.cloudflare.com

Resulting waterfalls look strange somehow:

cloudflare - first request isn't included in waterfall:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/160114...1/details/

google - no request in waterfall at all:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/160114_7A_M43/

twitter - same as with cloudflare, first request not in waterfall:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/160114...1/details/

Any ideas?

Regards, Nils

[pmeenan]

My guess is that Firefox falls back to SPDY if HTTP/2 is disabled and I haven't implemented SPDY decode in the firefox agents yet. Is there a pref to disable SPDY as well? If so you'll want to set that (since that's what you want to test anyway).

[nilskuhn]

Great guess, that's it!

Code:

firefoxPref    network.http.spdy.enabled    false
firefoxPref    network.http.spdy.enabled.http2    false
navigate    https://www.cloudflare.com

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/160114...1/details/

And second firefox preference is possibly unnecessary.

[jgarza]

Update: I did some testing and seems the only setting needed to disable h2 and spdy in Firefox is network.http.spdy.enabled

Code:

// Disable SPDY/h2
firefoxPref    network.http.spdy.enabled false

// Navigate to the page in question -navigate command is required when scripting-
navigate    https://http2.akamai.com

Here is the WPT test where this has been tested: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/160401...78e43d26b/

[jgarza]

Pat,

I just did a test https://www.webpagetest.org/result/16100...05c6ade7f/ and seems h2 is not getting disabled in Firefox anymore.

Do you know what could be the reason?

[akshayranganath]

I see one more option called "network.http.spdy.enabled.v3-1". When I turned this off, I was able to force HTTP2 to be turned off on FF.

firefoxPref network.http.spdy.enabled false
firefoxPref network.http.spdy.enabled.http2 false
firefoxPref network.http.spdy.enabled.v3-1 false
navigate https://http2.akamai.com

WPT: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/16100...view_step1

[jgarza]

I just discovered that h2 will only be disabled when using Tabs (instead of spaces) to separate Firefox settings.

For example:

1) using spaces to separate settings renders the page over h2: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/16111...95c4b176e/ I am using:
firefoxPref network.http.spdy.enabled false
firefoxPref network.http.spdy.enabled.http2 false
firefoxPref network.http.spdy.enabled.v3-1 false
navigate https://http2.akamai.com/

2) using tabs to separate settings renders the page over h1:
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/16111...1deb2320d/
firefoxPref network.http.spdy.enabled false
firefoxPref network.http.spdy.enabled.http2 false
firefoxPref network.http.spdy.enabled.v3-1 false
navigate https://http2.akamai.com/

When I try with Firefox itself (without WPT) h2 gets disabled by just setting "firefoxPref network.http.spdy.enabled.http2 false" within about:config

Pat, do you know if there is something on the WPT code that may cause that?

[pmeenan]

The scrips are always supposed to be tab delimited. There is some server-side logic that tries to convert space-delimited scripts to tab but it may not be handling the firefoxPref command correctly.

[pmeenan]

Yep, should be fixed now. The conversion logic didn't treat firefoxPref as a "3 parameter" script command which was messing it up.