http pipelining

[DVDGuy]

Any good articles or tips on how http pipelining can be used to speed up the performance of a website?

Do I need to modify apache for this?

[shri]

No mods required it is a part of HTTP 1.1 and supported by most modern webservers.

The concept it simple. Rather than establish a new connection for every request and wait for requests to be satisfied before sending the next request, pipelining involves sending a number of request over the wire at the same time and allowing the webserver to fullfill them.

Take a look at the W3 spec for pipelining.

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec8.html

[shri]

Second part of the response -- if you're looking to speed up the performance, try and split the site up across multiple domains / webservers.

http://images.domain.com
http://css.domain.com

While the initial requests may take longer with multiple DNS calls, the client should be able to spread the pipelining across the servers giving your site a slight boost.