The Journey of a Request to the Backend

This episode explores the intricate journey of a request from a frontend application to a backend process, revealing the often-overlooked complexities involved. Against the backdrop of common assumptions about request processing, the speaker delves into the six key stages: connection establishment, reading bytes, decryption, parsing, decoding, and finally, processing. More significantly, the discussion highlights the significant CPU overhead incurred during decryption, parsing, and decoding, particularly with protocols like HTTP2. For instance, the speaker emphasizes the importance of understanding these steps to optimize backend performance and avoid premature scaling solutions. The speaker also discusses the challenges of efficient connection acceptance, reading data as fast as the client sends, and handling incomplete requests. Ultimately, this detailed analysis underscores the need for backend engineers to understand the low-level mechanics of request handling to build truly performant applications, rather than relying solely on readily available libraries.