HTTP Graceful Shutdown TL;DR

Ever wondered how to politely hang up an HTTP chat? In this episode of The Backend Engineering Show, Hussein Nasser explains why you’d want to gracefully close connections—think freeing up resources, dodging bad actors, and letting in-flight requests finish cleanly. He walks through HTTP/1.1’s Connection: close header and the extra considerations when you’re multiplexing over HTTP/2.

Then it’s on to HTTP/2’s GOAWAY frame: how it signals the end of new streams, lets existing streams wrap up, and keeps both client and server in sync during shutdown. Timestamps, code links, and Chromium issue references are included if you want to dive deeper.

Watch on YouTube