HTTP Graceful Shutdown | The Backend Engineering Show

Ever wondered how servers politely hang up on clients? In this episode, Hussein dives into why you might need to kill connections—think resource wrangling, stopping bad actors, and simply freeing up sockets—and walks through clean shutdowns in HTTP/1.1 using the Connection header and in HTTP/2 with the GOAWAY frame. He also breaks down the cost implications and real-world trade-offs, all neatly timestamped so you can jump right to the juicy bits.

On top of the core content, you’ll find links to Chromium source code, issue trackers, Node.js internals, and a slew of backend-engineering courses and playlists in the show notes. Stick around for a quick recap at 23:40, or bookmark the full Backend Engineering roadmap if you’re hungry for more.

Watch on YouTube