Chapter 4. Connection Management

The HTTP specifications explain HTTP messages fairly well, but they don't talk much about HTTP connections, the critical plumbing that HTTP messages flow through. If you're a programmer writing HTTP applications, you need to understand the ins and outs of HTTP connections and how to use them.

HTTP connection management has been a bit of a black art, learned as much from experimentation and apprenticeship as from published literature. In this chapter, you'll learn about:

How HTTP uses TCP connections

Delays, bottlenecks and clogs in TCP connections

HTTP optimizations, including parallel, keep-alive, and pipelined connections

Dos and don'ts for managing connections