Hewlett Packard Enterprise

cory@lukasa.co.uk

Google, Inc.

brad@danga.com

Applications and Real-Time Area Hypertext Transfer Protocol Working Group Internet-Draft This document defines a standard format and well-known URI for HTTP/2 server implementations to expose their internal state for the purposes of debugging and interoperability work.

The HTTP/2 specification provides an alternative framing layer for the semantics of HTTP/1.1 . This alternative framing layer includes substantially greater quantities of state to be stored by all implementations. Disagreements on the state of the connection are the cause of the vast majority of interoperability errors in HTTP/2 implementations. In general it is not possible for implementations to query the internal state of their peer, and those implementations that do expose their internal state do it using a number of different interfaces, in different places, and in different formats. This makes it hard to debug interoperability problems, particularly when those problems arise on the open web with implementations that have unknown configuration and that may not identify themselves clearly. This document defines a standard format and well-known URI for HTTP/2 server implementations to make their internal state available for introspection. This allows both new and established implementers to do more effective testing of their implementations, as well as to enable them to more effectively diagnose and report subtle bugs in both their own and other implementations.

The key words “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHALL NOT”, “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, “RECOMMENDED”, “MAY”, and “OPTIONAL” in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 .

An implementation that wishes to support the HTTP/2 debug state information does so by publishing a JSON document at a well-known URI (): specifically, at .well-known/h2interop/state. This JSON document reveals aspects of the state of the specific HTTP/2 connection as seen by the implementation in question at the time of response generation. This JSON document is represented as a single JSON object with multiple keys. The object has several mandatory keys, as well as several optional ones. The fields are outlined below.

The “settings” key in the state object is associated with a JSON object that contains the remote implementation’s active settings. These are the settings that are actually in force for the connection at this time. This means that if the implementation has emitted a SETTINGS frame but has not yet received an ACK, the changes in that SETTINGS frame MUST NOT be reflected in the object. Each setting is published along with its value. The name of each setting MUST be the same as its name in Section 6.5.2: for example, “SETTINGS_ENABLE_PUSH”. The values MUST be sent as JSON integers. An implementation MAY omit a setting from this object if it has never been emitted by the implementation. In this situation it should be assumed that the default value is in force. A conforming implementation MUST emit this field. Sample output:

The “peerSettings” key in the state object is associated with a JSON object that contains the remote implementation’s view of the local implementation’s settings. These are the settings that are actually in force for the connection at this time. The value of this key is exactly symmetrical with the value of the “settings” key: see for more. A conforming implementation MUST emit this field. Sample output:

The “connFlowOut” key in the state object is associated with a JSON integer that reflects the remote peer’s outbound connection window size. This represents the number of flow controlled bytes the remote implementation believes it can emit before the entire connection is blocked behind flow control. A conforming implementation MUST emit this field. Sample output:

The “connFlowIn” key in the state object is associated with a JSON integer that reflects the remote peer’s inbound connection window size. This represents the number of flow controlled bytes the remote implementation believes it can receive before the entire connection is blocked behind flow control. A conforming implementation MUST emit this field. Sample output:

The “streams” key in the state object is associated with a JSON object containing state about all the active streams on the connection. A stream MUST be represnted in this JSON object if it is in any state other than IDLE or CLOSED. This JSON object has keys that are the stream IDs for the active streams. Each key has an object associated with it, with the following keys: “state”: This key maps to a string value representing the stream state. The stream states are represented as all-caps ASCII text with all parentheses stripped and spaces replaced with underscores. For example, “OPEN” or “HALF_CLOSED_LOCAL”. This field MUST be present. “flowIn”: The remote peer’s inbound stream window size as a JSON integer. This represents the number of flow controlled bytes the remote implementation believes it can receive on this stream before this stream is blocked behind flow control. This field MUST be present. “flowOut”: The remote peer’s outbound stream window size as a JSON integer. This represents the number of flow controlled bytes the remote implementation believes it can send on this stream before this stream is blocked behind flow control. This field MUST be present. “dataIn”: The number of bytes of data the remote implementation has received on this stream. This excludes padding bytes. This field MAY be present, but is optional. “dataOut”: The number of bytes of data the remote implementation has sent on this stream. This excludes padding bytes. This field MAY be present, but is optional. A conforming implementation MUST emit this field, but MAY omit any of the optional sub-fields. Sample output:

The “hpack” key contains information about the HPACK compression state for the connection. It maps to a JSON object that represents this compression state. This JSON object contains the following fields: “inbound_table_size”: The current size of the HPACK dynamic header table for the headers emitted by the local implementation, as an integer. This field MUST be present. “outbound_table_size”: The current size of the HPACK dynamic header table for the headers emitted by the remote implementation, as an integer. Note that this value MUST include the headers added to the compression context as part of serving this response. This field MUST be present. “inbound_dynamic_header_table”: The entries added to the HPACK dynamic header table by the local implementation. This is formatted as a JSON array of two-element JSON arrays, the first element of which contains the header name and the second element of which contains the header value. This field MAY be omitted. “outbound_dynamic_header_table”: The entries added to the HPACK dynamic header table by the remote implementation. This is formatted in the same manner as “inbound_dynamic_header_table”. This field MAY be omitted. A conforming implementation MAY omit this field. If it does include this field, it MAY omit any optional sub-fields. Sample output:

The “sentGoAway” field tracks whether or not a GOAWAY frame ( Section 6.8) has been sent on the connection by the remote implementation. The value of this field is boolean. A conforming implementation MAY omit this field. Sample output:

In addition to these fields, implementations MAY add their own debugging information, as appropriate, to the JSON object. These MUST be keyed off keys other than the ones defined in this document. For example, some implementations are known to expose the number of threads they currently have active in the “threads” field.

One of the most common issues when implementing HTTP/2 is to have problems with flow control windows. This is why the “connFlowOut” () and “connFlowIn” () fields are defined in the JSON document. However, it’s possible that the two implementations disagree on the size of this window, and that the server believes that it cannot send the response body because it’s blocked behind flow control. For this reason, a small amount of debugging data MUST be inserted into the response headers for this JSON document. This ensures that it is possible for implementations to discover that they have inadvertently blocked the debug response behind flow control, and to take action to widen the flow control window so that the response can be delivered. The following header fields MUST be emitted by implementations.

The “conn-flow-in” header field contains the size of the remote implementation’s inbound flow control window. The field value contains only the size of that window in octets. This MUST be calculated the same way that the implementation calculates “connFlowIn” ().

The “conn-flow-out” header field contains the size of the remote implementation’s outbound flow control window. The field value contains only the size of that window in octets. This MUST be calculated the same way that the implementation calculates “connFlowOut” ().

This document establishes a single well-known URI, with the suffix “h2interop/state”.

This specification describes an optimized expression of the semantics of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), referred to as HTTP version 2 (HTTP/2). HTTP/2 enables a more efficient use of network resources and a reduced perception of latency by introducing header field compression and allowing multiple concurrent exchanges on the same connection. It also introduces unsolicited push of representations from servers to clients.This specification is an alternative to, but does not obsolete, the HTTP/1.1 message syntax. HTTP's existing semantics remain unchanged. In many standards track documents several words are used to signify the requirements in the specification. These words are often capitalized. This document defines these words as they should be interpreted in IETF documents. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. This memo defines a path prefix for "well-known locations", "/.well-known/", in selected Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) schemes. [STANDARDS-TRACK] The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a stateless \%application- level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypertext information systems. This document defines the semantics of HTTP/1.1 messages, as expressed by request methods, request header fields, response status codes, and response header fields, along with the payload of messages (metadata and body content) and mechanisms for content negotiation.

We would like to thank the attendees of the 2016 HTTP Workshop in Stockholm for their feedback on early prototype implementations of this debugging feature.

(This appendix to be deleted by the RFC editor.)