Maybe wise though. Biting off http2 on both sides in a load balancer all at once might not be smart. Especially at the same time as multithreading.

I agree. I already offload SSL in HAProxy. I'm sure we'll see HTTP2 for frontend/backend communication eventually down the line, but this is a huge and big first step.

AFAIK, this is true of nginx also and from what I've heard in the past, they see no reason to change it.

I can't find it now, but I'm sure they had pretty compelling benchmarks that showed that with keepalive & low-latency networks, performance wise, there's little, if any, performance difference.

> AFAIK, this is true of nginx also and from what I've heard in the past, they see no reason to change it.

http2 backends support is on the roadmap https://trac.nginx.org/nginx/roadmap - so you can expect it to be implemented.

The reason would be so that the backend can take advantage of H2 features.

Look at Lyft's Envoy:

https://www.envoyproxy.io/

Based on your comments, I assume you're involved with HAProxy?

Is HTTP/1.0 (vs 1.1) actually used anywhere? Both versions are also compatible so what's the issue? Also seems rather disingenuous to say "even" when Envoy has plenty of other advanced features.

Server side is on its way for next release, haproxy 1.9.