Reducing HTTP latency

The evolution of the Web in the last decade has given end users a remarkable improvement in the Web navigation experience. In order to transport a Web page the stateless HTTP protocol is employed. The first documented version of HTTP was HTTP V0.9 1 in 1991. HTTP V0.9 was designed to provide a single document request, which was sufficient to deliver a single hypertext document over a TCP connection. The advent of the HTML has changed the Web page structure which is not only made by single document, but it is the result of the composition of several multimedia resources. HTTP/1.0 introduced the notion of HTTP headers, then updated by and HTTP/1.1 which introduced some performance-oriented methods, such as keepalive, pipelining, caching and more. Recently the idea of evolving HTTP/1.1 has attracted researchers and industries which are nowadays proposing HTTP/2.0 within the IETF working group HTTPbis. The main motivation behind the need of evolving HTTP/1.1 can be seen in Figure below which clearly shows that the Page Load Time linearly decreases with Internet latency, while a further increase of the link capacity does not introduce any benefit in the Page Load Time reduction.

Media:http://orm-chimera-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/1230000000545/images/hpbn_1006.png

Reducing HTTP latency[edit]

The evolution of the Web in the last decade has given end users a remarkable improvement in the Web navigation experience. In order to transport a Web page the stateless HTTP protocol is employed. The first documented version of HTTP was HTTP V0.9 1 in 1991. HTTP V0.9 was designed to provide a single document request, which was sufficient to deliver a single hypertext document over a TCP connection. The advent of the HTML has changed the Web page structure which is not only made by single document, but it is the result of the composition of several multimedia resources. HTTP/1.0 introduced the notion of HTTP headers, then updated by and HTTP/1.1 which introduced some performance-oriented methods, such as keepalive, pipelining, caching and more. Recently the idea of evolving HTTP/1.1 has attracted researchers and industries which are nowadays proposing HTTP/2.0 within the IETF working group HTTPbis. The main motivation behind the need of evolving HTTP/1.1 can be seen in Figure below which clearly shows that the Page Load Time linearly decreases with Internet latency, while a further increase of the link capacity does not introduce any benefit in the Page Load Time reduction.

Media:http://orm-chimera-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/1230000000545/images/hpbn_1006.png