It is not a secret that we used nginx as backend Web server for nghttp2.org. We use nghttpx as frontend “Edge” reverse proxy, and all requests except for the ones to /httpbin were routed to nginx via HTTP/2 protocol.

Today, we have replaced backend nginx with h2o. h2o is a relatively new brazing fast Web server. Actually, we don’t require performance in our low traffic Web site. The reason we chose h2o is its better HTTP/2 implementation. Since we use HTTP/2 as backend protocol between proxy and backend server, we’d like to use better backend HTTP/2 server. h2o supports both HTTP/1.1 as well as HTTP/2 without TLS by default without extra configuration. Currently, HTTP/2 priority in the frontend proxy connection is not propagated to the backend connection, so we couldn’t utilize the great scheduling mechanism built in h2o. When we implement it, we definitely want clever HTTP/2 scheduler like h2o.

We still use nghttpx as frontend reverse proxy.

Previously, with nginx, we added link header field in nginx configuration so that nghttpx could push resource based on it. Now we initiate push using nghttpx’s mruby scripting feature. The following script initiates the push for the resource “/stylesheet/screen.css” when request path is either “/” or “/index.html”:

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class App
  def on_req(env)
    req = env.req
    path = req.path
    if path == '/' || path == '/index.html'
      req.push '/stylesheets/screen.css'
    end
  end
end

App.new

And pass the file path containing the above script to nghttpx using --mruby-file option.