1440593 - https://tiles.services.mozilla.com don't use HTTP2

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Jet Villegas (inactive)]

Attachment: about:networking screenshot

https://tiles.services.mozilla.com doesn't use http2 presumably to support older clients. Upgrading can significantly improve new tab performance.

Comment 1

[Tim Spurway [:tspurway]]

:jbuck - could you weigh in on this?

Comment 2

[Jon Buckley [:jbuck]]

https://tiles.services.mozilla.com is currently being load balanced by an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) which doesn't support http2. To be able to use http2 we'd need to migrate to an Application Load Balancer (ALB). A list of things we should look at before doing this change:

- Are the same ciphers supported on ELB and ALB? I need to see the list of supported ciphers, and also pull ELB logs to see what ciphers are being used
- What's the cost difference of ELB vs ALB?
- Can we test the speed difference between ELB/ALB somehow? Is there some existing telemetry in Firefox that could be used for this?
- How should this be rolled out? We can use DNS for % of total requests, but I wonder if it's worth testing this before rolling it out to everyone. Maybe setup a new ALB and change the browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.telemetry.ping.endpoint config to the new ALB for a subset of users?