Tony's LShift Blog Posts: Streamlining HTTP
This page is a mirrored copy of an article originally posted on the (now sadly defunct) LShift blog; see the archive index here.
HTTP/1.1 is a lovely protocol. Text-based, sophisticated, flexible. It does tend toward the verbose though. What if we wanted to use HTTP’s semantics in a very high-speed messaging situation? How could we mitigate the overhead of all those headers?
Now, bandwidth is pretty cheap: cheap enough that for most applications the kind of approach I suggest below is ridiculously far over the top. Some situations, though, really do need a more efficient protocol: I’m thinking of people having to consume the OPRA feed, which is fast approaching 1 million messages per second (1, 2, 3). What if, in some bizarre situation, HTTP was the protocol used to deliver a full OPRA feed?
Instead of having each HTTP request start with a clean slate after the previous request on a given connection has been processed, how about giving connections a memory?
