Experience report: developing high performance HTTP/2 server in Haskell

Abstract

While the speed of the Internet has been increasing, HTTP/1.1 has been plagued by head-of-line blocking, low concurrency and redundant headers. To solve these problems, HTTP/2 was standardized. This paper summarizes our experience implementing HTTP/2 in Haskell. We found several techniques to improve the performance of the header compression and identified a suitable data structure for HTTP/2 priority. Also, we showed that Haskell lightweight threads are useful for HTTP/2 where the common tactics of one lightweight thread per connection cannot be used. The HTTP/2 implementation of Warp, the popular HTTP server library in Haskell, ultimately provides better throughput than its HTTP/1.1 counterpart.