Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Can Pipelining Help?

Can Pipelining Help?: "HTTP pipelining is often suggested as a way to dramatically improve page load times, or to solve multi-GET use cases for RESTful applications. Whether pipelining can achieve the intended effect or not truly depends on what gets pipelined and how the server implements pipelining.

When using pipelining, a HTTP client sends idempotent HTTP requests (such as GET) without waiting for response of previous requests, and expects responses to arrive in the same order from the server. HTTP 1.1 says nothing about order of processing of requests on the server side – servers can process each request in sequence or in parallel. All that matters is the order of responses."