Weekly edition	Kernel	Security	Distributions	Contact Us	Search
Archives	Calendar	Subscribe	Write for LWN	LWN.net FAQ	Sponsors

Reducing HTTP latency with SPDY

Posted Nov 19, 2009 13:22 UTC (Thu) by knobunc (subscriber, #4678)
In reply to: Reducing HTTP latency with SPDY by v13
Parent article: Reducing HTTP latency with SPDY

Sadly pipelining is off on most browsers.

Summarized from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_pipelining
* IE8 - no
* Firefox 3 - yes, but disabled by default
* Camino - same as FF3
* Konq 2.0 - yes, but disabled by default
* Opera - yes AND enabled by default
* Chrome - not believed to support it, certainly not enabled

(Log in to post comments)

Posted Nov 19, 2009 14:26 UTC (Thu) by v13 (subscriber, #42355) [Link]

The konqueror line is obsolete since konqueror 2.0 is from kde 2.0. I just
tested 4.3.2 and it uses pipelining.

Firefox OTOH doesn't (just tested it). The bad thing about Firefox is that
it opens multiple connections but keeps each connection alive after the data
are transmitted (!). What a misuse of resources!

However, the support is there and all HTTP/1.1 servers support it. AFAIK,
only akamai servers don't support keepalives (they support HTTP/1.0 only).

Reducing HTTP latency with SPDY

Posted Nov 22, 2009 16:38 UTC (Sun) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

> * Opera - yes AND enabled by default

Yet according to Opera engineers that was not easy. Even after many years of having that enabled by default they still has to tweak their blacklisting database to add new entry disabling the pipelining. If they would know in advance the pain they may not even implement it.