Re: Suggestion for NEW Issue: Pipelining problems

--On 18. juli 2007 11:06 +0100 Jamie Lokier <jamie@shareable.org> wrote:

> I suspect pipelining was added to HTTP because it's such a trivial and
> natural change - in fact no change to many servers - that it was
> thought it might be easy to deploy.  And there is no excuse really for
> getting it wrong, it really is quite trivial to implement.

actually pipelining (as far as I remember the debates - it is many years 
ago now) was added in an effort to get HTTP to be a better-behaved network 
citizen.

One interesting feature of one-TCP-connection-per-request is that TCP 
congestion control really doesn't kick in until about packet 6 or so, after 
the slow-start phase is over - and when most TCP connections are shorter 
than 6 packets, it means that a huge percentage of the Internet traffic 
really is travelling the Internet with no congestion at all - leaving the 
Internet unprotected from another round of congestion collapse.

It seems, however, that the Internet has survived the situation - once the 
majority of traffic is (congestion-controlled) filesharing, perhaps the 
not-so-nice HTTP sessions don't count for that much after all....

                   Harald