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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

Mitigation

Response headers must have the following properties:

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.