Implementation Guidelines

Same /baseline2?a=…&b=… sum endpoint as the HTTP/2-TLS baseline, served as HTTP/2 cleartext — no TLS, h2 framing from the first byte. This matches the deployment pattern behind TLS-terminating load balancers (ALB → backend, nginx → app server) and inside service meshes where mTLS is handled by sidecars.

Port: 8082 Connections: 256, 1,024, 4,096 Concurrent streams per connection: 100 Negotiation: prior-knowledge (h2load -p h2c)

Workload

GET /baseline2?a=1&b=1 sent over HTTP/2 cleartext. h2load opens multiple connections, each multiplexing up to 100 concurrent streams. The first bytes on every connection are the h2 preface — there is no HTTP/1.1 Upgrade dance and no ALPN (no TLS).

What it measures

• HTTP/2 framing + HPACK + multiplexing without TLS overhead
• Protocol implementation cost in isolation — the delta against baseline-h2 is roughly the TLS cost
• How cleanly the framework refuses non-h2 traffic on a port declared h2c-only

The port must be h2c-only

Validation explicitly checks that port 8082 refuses plain HTTP/1.1 requests. A server that dual-serves h1 and h2c on the same port would let the benchmark measure whichever protocol the client picked — useless for ranking. Frameworks that want to expose h1 too must do it on a different port.

Expected request/response

GET /baseline2?a=1&b=1 HTTP/2

HTTP/2 200 OK
Content-Type: text/plain

2

How it differs from baseline-h2

Parameters