Persistent Connections
In HTTP/0.9 and 1.0, the connection is closed after a single request/response pair. In HTTP/1.1 a keep-alive-mechanism was introduced, where a connection could be reused for more than one request. Such persistent connections reduce request latency perceptibly, because the client does not need to re-negotiate the TCP connection after the first request has been sent. Another positive side effect is that in general the connection becomes faster with time due to TCP's slow-start-mechanism.
Version 1.1 of the protocol also made bandwidth optimization improvements to HTTP/1.0. For example, HTTP/1.1 introduced chunked transfer encoding to allow content on persistent connections to be streamed rather than buffered. HTTP pipelining further reduces lag time, allowing clients to send multiple requests before waiting for each response. Another improvement to the protocol was byte serving, where a server transmits just the portion of a resource explicitly requested by a client.
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Famous quotes containing the words persistent and/or connections:
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“The conclusion suggested by these arguments might be called the paradox of theorizing. It asserts that if the terms and the general principles of a scientific theory serve their purpose, i. e., if they establish the definite connections among observable phenomena, then they can be dispensed with since any chain of laws and interpretive statements establishing such a connection should then be replaceable by a law which directly links observational antecedents to observational consequents.”
—C.G. (Carl Gustav)