From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Oct 16 10:32:18 1995 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id KAA14941 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 16 Oct 1995 10:32:18 -0700 Received: from who.cdrom.com (who.cdrom.com [192.216.222.3]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id KAA14936 for ; Mon, 16 Oct 1995 10:32:16 -0700 Received: from mail.cs.tu-berlin.de (root@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de [130.149.17.13]) by who.cdrom.com (8.6.12/8.6.11) with ESMTP id KAA06722 for ; Mon, 16 Oct 1995 10:30:20 -0700 Received: from curie.cs.tu-berlin.de (wosch@curie.cs.tu-berlin.de [130.149.18.44]) by mail.cs.tu-berlin.de (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id SAA17747 for ; Mon, 16 Oct 1995 18:25:44 +0100 From: Wolfram Schneider Received: (wosch@localhost) by curie.cs.tu-berlin.de (8.6.12/8.6.9) id SAA15767; Mon, 16 Oct 1995 18:25:42 +0100 Date: Mon, 16 Oct 1995 18:25:42 +0100 Message-Id: <199510161725.SAA15767@curie.cs.tu-berlin.de> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: FYI: Analysis of HTTP Performance problems MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk http://sunsite.unc.edu/mdma-release/http-prob.html Abstract This paper is the first in a series on performance issues in the World Wide Web. HTTP is a transfer protocol used by the World Wide Web distributed hypermedia system to retrieve distributed objects. HTTP uses TCP as a transport layer. Certain design features of HTTP interact badly with TCP, causing problems with performance and with server scalability. Latency problems are caused by opening a single connection per request, through connection setup and slow-start costs. Further avoidable latency is incurred due to the protocol only returning a single object per request. Scalability problems are caused by TCP requring a server to maintain state for all recently closed connections. Wolfram -- Wolfram Schneider wosch