HTTP Graceful Shutdown

In this episode of The Backend Engineering Show, Hussein Nasser breaks down why you’d want to close connections gracefully—whether it’s to free up resources, dodge errant clients, or just keep things tidy. He walks through HTTP/1.1’s Connection header trick for finishing in-flight requests and then jumps into HTTP/2’s GOAWAY frame, revealing how it lets you signal “I’m done accepting new streams, but let the current ones finish” without dropping everything.

Along the way you’ll get real Chromium code pointers, insights on HTTP/2’s performance trade-offs, and a friendly step-by-step (with timestamps!) on how to implement and test these graceful-shutdown strategies in your own backend.@endsection

Watch on YouTube