HTTP Pipelining
Objective
Speed up Chrome's network stack by enabling HTTP Pipelining. Pipelining issues multiple requests over a single connection without waiting for a response.
Risks
- Broken servers. Servers may ignore pipelined requests or corrupt the responses.
- Broken proxies. May cause the same problems. Some users are behind "transparent proxies," where the requests are proxied even though the user has not explicitly specified a proxy in their system configuration.
- Front of queue blocking. The first request in a pipeline may block other requests in the pipeline. The net result of pipelining may be slower page loads.
Mitigation
Response headers must have the following properties:
- HTTP/1.1
- Determinable content length, either through explicit Content-Length or chunked encoding
- A keep-alive connection (implicit with HTTP/1.1)
- No authentication
Pipelining does not begin until these criteria have been met for an origin (host and port pair). If at any point one of these fail, the origin is black-listed in the client. If an origin has successfully pipelined before, it is remembered and pipelining begins immediately on next use.
Status
The option to enable pipelining has been removed from Chrome, as there are known crashing bugs and known front-of-queue blocking issues. There are also a large number of servers and middleboxes that behave badly and inconsistently when pipelining is enabled. Until these are resolved, it's recommended nobody uses pipelining. Doing so currently requires a custom build of Chromium.