Nginx 1.24 Released With TLSv1.3 Protocol Enabled By Default

[brad0]

Is nginx the best web server?

Of course.

[Jabberwocky]

I wonder how a web server designed from the ground up around io-uring would look architecturally? Would it be like nginx except some low level plumbing differences, or would it be drastically different?

Good question. If I had to guess I would just expect some plumbing differences, but I'm not an expert on this. The reason why I wouldn't be surprised if something else pops up is because abstraction and specialization are mutually exclusive. Nginx has done some really good specialization with it's implementation.

Nginx has specialized in many levels of the ISO model. The application by far the most with main process and worker processes per CPU. The presentation layer I am not sure but it's dependencies like SSL certainly have made headlines. The Session layer has had optimization too with things like reusing system sockets. The team has done good job there's no doubt about it. This and it's modular design is what makes Nginx good.

HTTP/3 is a beast. It changes many things from features on the application down to transport layer with QUIC (UDP). QUIC even by it self can cause the whole application to function very differently good and bad (with all the new features me might see much more DDOS attacks). It has forward error correction (redundant data in each packet), connection migration (moving from fibre to mobile without dropping the connection), socket multiplexing etc. There's a lot to learn both in the lab and in the wild. It could be that the industry doesn't rely on many of the new features and that will count in Nginx's favor. We will just have to wait and see what really happens, but If you want the same level of optimization that Nginx currently provides for HTTP/2 with HTTP/3 features then it might be easier to redo it from scratch.

Coming back to your original question. I am not sure how one would specialize for HTTP/3 features because we first have to see what the important features are and how to implement those properly. Only after that will we be able to specialize securely like Nginx currently does for HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2. We might end up with the same architecture but a new implementation, unlikely but possible. I'm looking forward to see what cool and crazy things people come up with by using HTTP/3.