HTTP: The Definitive Guide

For More Information

This completes our overview of the HTTP plumbing trade. Please refer to the following reference sources for more information about TCP performance and HTTP connection-management facilities.

HTTP Connections

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt

RFC 2616, “Hypertext Transfer Protocol—HTTP/1.1,” is the official specification for HTTP/1.1; it explains the usage of and HTTP header fields for implementing parallel, persistent, and pipelined HTTP connections. This document does not cover the proper use of the underlying TCP connections.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2068.txt

RFC 2068 is the 1997 version of the HTTP/1.1 protocol. It contains explanation of the HTTP/1.0+ Keep-Alive connections that is missing from RFC 2616.

http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/draft-ietf-http-connection-00.txt

This expired Internet draft, “HTTP Connection Management,” has some good discussion of issues facing HTTP connection management.

HTTP Performance Issues

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/Performance/

This W3C web page, entitled “HTTP Performance Overview,” contains a few papers and tools related to HTTP performance and connection management.

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/1.0/HTTPPerformance.html

This short memo by Simon Spero, “Analysis of HTTP Performance Problems,” is one of the earliest (1994) assessments of HTTP connection performance. The memo gives some early performance measurements of the effect of connection setup, slow start, and lack of connection sharing.

ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/WRL/research-reports/WRL-TR-95.4.pdf ...