Optimizing Latency of the HTTP Protocol

The WorldWide Web (WWW) hypertext system uses TCP/IP connections for network-transparent access to hypertext documents. Documents often contain several inlined images which have to be transferred as individual documents from the server to the client. For each transfer a separate TCP/IP connection has to be established. A significant amount of the total response time is caused by the latency due to the opening procedure of a TCP/IP connection. This paper presents a small extension of the HTTP protocol used by WWW servers and clients. The extension allows the re-use of established connections and, thus, reduces laten-cy. At the same time, the extension is transparent to servers and clients using the standard HTTP protocol.