HTTP Graceful Shutdown TL;DR

In this episode of The Backend Engineering Show, Hussein dives into why you’d ever want to politely close HTTP connections—whether it’s to dodge bad actors, free up resources or avoid weird edge-case bugs. He breaks down how HTTP/1.1 uses the Connection: close header to finish pending requests before dropping clients, then moves on to HTTP/2’s GOAWAY frame and the cost/benefit of multiplexing streams.

Along the way you get clear, timestamped examples, links to Chromium’s socket manager code and related bug reports, plus a roundup of Hussein’s courses on Node.js internals, networking, databases and more—perfect if you’re ready to level up your backend game.

Watch on YouTube