HTTP Graceful Shutdown TL;DR

In this episode of The Backend Engineering Show, Hussein dives into why your servers sometimes need to politely hang up on clients—be it to dodge bad actors, free up resources, or avoid nasty surprises. You’ll learn the nitty-gritty of how HTTP/1.1 uses the Connection header to wind down sessions and how HTTP/2 ups the game with the GOAWAY frame, plus a peek at the performance trade-offs.

Want more? Timestamps guide you through each segment (from “Why shutdown?” to “GOAWAY deep dive”), and a slew of links point you to Chromium source code, GitHub issues, and courses on everything from Node internals to NGINX. Perfect snack-size backend wisdom with follow-along resources!

Watch on YouTube