Identifying the Performance Impairment of HTTP

Online web services have been constantly developed and offered through the Internet. These services rely on webpages that are hosted on remote servers and are transmitted to clients via HTTP upon requests. While HTTP has been updated to support more and more sophisticated services with increasing amount of multimedia content, the real-world adoption of those updates is still very slow. In this paper, we investigate the performance impairment in current HTTP implementations and suggest solutions to improve the situation. Specifically, we identify two insights, i.e., avoiding unnecessary DNS lookups by replacing domain names with prefetched IP addresses for linked resources and reducing TCP connections by attaching linked resources to HTML files as binary stream, that could be employed to largely improve the performance of web services without modifying HTTP itself. Through extensive measurements, we validate our insights and the results confirm our findings.