HTTP/2 tuning notes for small servers
Most HTTP/2 tuning advice is written for large sites. On a two-core server serving a few thousand visitors a day, the defaults are usually fine, and the gains come from elsewhere.
What actually helped
Enabling TLS session resumption cut handshake time for returning visitors noticeably. Serving pre-compressed assets removed most of the CPU spent on gzip. Long cache lifetimes for fingerprinted files did more than any protocol setting.
ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:10m;
ssl_session_timeout 1d;
gzip_static on;What did not
Raising stream concurrency limits and tweaking buffer sizes made no measurable difference at this scale. We now measure first and leave the defaults alone unless the numbers say otherwise.