Re: How to manage buggy http/2 in MacOS and Linux

On Mon, 18 Nov 2019, Jeroen Ooms via curl-library wrote:

> I maintain the libcurl R bindings which are used by 1M+ users to build
> clients for countless web services. On MacOS and Linux, the bindings link to
> the system version of libcurl. As of MacOS Catalina (released last month)
> this is now libcurl 7.64.1 which is the first time that http/2 is enabled by
> default.

Aha, I didn't even realize this happened...

> Users that have upgraded to Catalina are reporting applications that were
> stable before are now randomly giving "Error in the HTTP2 framing layer"
> errors. Similar sounds from Linux users. As we know, HTTP/2 support in
> libcurl was quite buggy until very recently (eg:
> https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/09/05/curl-7-61-1-comes-with-only-bug-fixes/
> ) and maybe still today not as reliable as HTTP/1.

It is definately clear to me that HTTP/2 is much more complicated and hard to
get done right than HTTP/1.

My impression, and I want to emphasize that I only have an impression not much
better than anyone else's, is that HTTP/2 works fine in general but there are
cases and corners where it has had bugs. Meaning that most users will be able
to use HTTP/2 just fine and never hit the problems, while others will get into
issues.

It may also be that some users - such as yours - more typically use setups or
scenarios which had more issues in curl. I don't know.

> As maintainer of the bindings, I'm not sure how to handle this. One solution
> would to be override the default CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION in the bindings to
> CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1 for certain versions of libcurl, but it's hard to
> judge which versions of libcurl have robust http/2 support.

I'm not sure how you'd be able to tell that for sure either. I mean, we've
fixed HTTP/2 related bugs in master (post 7.67.0) that haven't even been
released yet, but I'm not sure if that is enough to mark the version as "not
robust". I don't think that issue as an example hits particularly many uses
cases.

Perhaps you should just make everything below version X to not use it by
default for safety. What 'X' is I don't know...

> Perhaps it would be useful to collect some experiences about the state of
> http/2 in libcurl from people who have done large-scale testing with http/2
> in real life

That would be awesome. Although drawing conclusions and making decisions for
individual users based on that might be hard!

I also fear that some of the highest volume users won't talk about their
experiences in public. :-/

-- 
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