Analysis of the effects of removing redundant header information in persistent HTTP connections

This paper examines the potential benefits of an extension to the HTTP protocol that allows the web sen,er and client to establish a session of HTTP messages as opposed to a sequence of independent connections. Bile report results from experiments which measure the potential bandwidth saving achieved by removing redundant headers when possible. Me report findings from an actual implementation of the protocol extension, from which we derive a model for calculating the potential bandwidth savings based oil statistics of the HTTP traffic. Based oil our implementation, we propose an architecture which can be used to deploy the protocol extension Oil point-to-point network, connections without interfering with the operation of either the web client (browser) or sen,er Next, we examine the access logs from our departmental web sen,er and calculate the expected savings based oil statistics from observed HTTP traffic. The impact of removing redundant header information in HTTP replies is fairly minimal (1-5% savings) because the size Of the content is much larger than the size of the header However, we found that, on average, HTTP requests from clients to servers are reduced to 55 to 60 percent of their normal size.