HTTP Graceful Shutdown in a Nutshell

In this episode of The Backend Engineering Show, Hussein dives into why you’d want to gracefully close HTTP connections—whether it’s to free up resources, thwart bad actors, or simply wrap up pending requests without chaos. You’ll get the lowdown on HTTP/1.1’s Connection header approach and how HTTP/2 handles it with the GOAWAY frame, along with a quick peek at performance costs and Chromium’s implementation quirks.

Along the way, timestamps guide you through the deep dive (from “Why shutdown?” to “GOAWAY frame” and beyond), and you’ll find a treasure trove of related links—from source code and issue trackers to courses on Node.js internals, networking, databases, NGINX, Python, and more. Perfect for backend engineers looking to tighten up their connection game!

Watch on YouTube