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HTTP Connection Management

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HTTP is a request/response protocol. You request some resource like the HTML of a webpage and the response comes back with the HTML attached.  As each request is sent on a connection, the complete response must be read from the connection before the next response can be read. (There is an optimization where you make more requests on a connection before receiving the full response to the previous requests known as pipelining. However it doesn’t change the need to receive all the data from the previous requests first.)

So if an application is asking for another request to a server while the current one is in progress, what’s a HTTP Client API to do? Well, it can either wait till the connection is available or start a new connection. This decision is mostly controlled by a configurable maximum number of simultaneous connections to a server.

With that in mind, how should the following customer question get answered?

My client application’s performance is getting impacted by WinInet opening new SSL connections to my server rather than reusing the existing connection. How do I fix this?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 02, 2010
    I'd say: "Ensure that the complete response from the first connection is received, then start a new one." Ok?