The case for persistent-connection HTTP

Jeffrey C. Mogul
1995 Computer communication review  
more round trips than necessary (see section 2). Several researchers have proposed modifying HTTP to The success of the World-Wide Web is largely due to eliminate unnecessary network round-trips [21, 27] . Some the simplicity, hence ease of implementation, of the Hypeople have questioned the impact of these proposals on pertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTP, however, network, server, and client performance. This paper reports makes inefficient use of network and server resources, on simulation
more » ... experiments, driven by traces collected from and adds unnecessary latencies, by creating a new TCP an extremely busy Web server, that support the proposed connection for each request. Modifications to HTTP HTTP modifications. According to these simulations, the have been proposed that would transport multiple remodifications will improve user's perceived performance, quests over each TCP connection. These modifications network loading, and server resource utilization. have led to debate over their actual impact on users, on The paper begins with an overview of HTTP (section 2) servers, and on the network. This paper reports the and an analysis of its flaws (section 3). Section 4 describes results of log-driven simulations of several variants of the proposed HTTP modifications, and section 5 describes the proposed modifications, which demonstrate the some of the potential design issues of the modified value of persistent connections. protocol. Section 7 describes the design of the simulation
doi:10.1145/217391.217465 fatcat:kq23cv3fmnbnzbhefdw7kaxfde