Issue link: https://read.uberflip.com/i/1146286
There's More | 9 The browser or server can close the connection by sending a Connection: close header. Technically, the Connection: keep-alive header is not required in HTTP/1.1, but most browsers and servers still include it. Pipelining, defined in HTTP/1.1, allows for sending multiple requests over a single socket without waiting for a response. Pipelining has better performance than persis- tent connections. Unfortunately, pipelining is not supported in Internet Explorer (up to and including version 7), and it's turned off by default in Firefox through version 2. Until pipelining is more widely adopted, Keep-Alive is the way browsers and serv- ers can more efficiently use socket connections for HTTP. This is even more impor- tant for HTTPS because establishing new secure socket connections is more time consuming. There's More This chapter contains just an overview of HTTP and focuses only on the aspects that affect performance. To learn more, read the HTTP specification (http://www.w3.org/ Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html) and HTTP: The Definitive Guide by David Gourley and Brian Totty (O'Reilly; http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/httptdg). The parts high- lighted here are sufficient for understanding the best practices described in the following chapters.