HTTP Graceful Shutdown TL;DR

In this episode of The Backend Engineering Show, Hussein breaks down why you’d ever want to politely close your HTTP connections (think preventing resource leaks, dodging bad actors, and letting in-flight requests finish cleanly). He covers the classic HTTP/1.1 “Connection: close” handshake and then jumps into HTTP/2’s GOAWAY frame, explaining how you signal the last stream ID and avoid new requests while still wrapping up existing ones.

Along the way you’ll hear about the performance trade-offs of HTTP/2 (extra streams, head-of-line blocking) and get timestamped pointers for each segment—from the 0:00 intro to the 23:40 wrap-up—plus links to Chromium code, issue trackers, and a raft of backend engineering courses if you want to dig deeper.

Watch on YouTube